Department of Classics - UCLA

The Constantinian Compromise: Senators, Bishops and the Emperor in Rome
2021-10-28 16:00 - 17:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Royce Hall 306

Mathias Hanses | “Cicero with Local Applications: Pro Archia Poeta and W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk.”
2021-11-15 16:00 - 17:30

Joseph Howley | "Slavery and the Book: Toward a New Social History of Roman Literature"
2021-11-19 17:00 - 18:00

Hannah Culík-Baird | "Poetry as Artefact in Cicero"
2021-11-22 16:00 - 18:00

MA Paper and SCS Presentations
2021-12-07 15:00 - 17:00
We are delighted to invite you to come and hear one MA paper and two SCS practice papers, delivered by our graduate students, in Dodd 248 on Tuesday, December 7th from 3-5 pm.

Our presentations will be:

Patrick Callahan (MA paper): “Pliny’s Epistolary Feast.”
Jasmine Akiyama-Kim (SCS paper): “Odysseus’s Two Bodies: Recognition as Construction in Odyssey 19.”
Zakarias Gram (SCS paper) “A Condemnation of Nature”: The Reception of Propatheia in Late Antiquity.”

Looking forward to seeing everyone there!

Lawrence Kim | "Why Do We Call Early Greek Poetry 'Archaic'? Periodization and Histories of Greek Literature, 1830-2022"
2022-01-27 17:00 - 18:30 | Zoom
Zoom Link | Zoom Meeting ID: 3131 1616 94
*There is a password on this account; please contact purves@ucla.edu if you need the password.

Elliott Piros | Purple Motion: Pantomime Dance in Martial's Epigrams
2022-02-10 17:00 - 18:30
This event will be held in person and on zoom.
For in-person non-UCLA attendees, please note UCLA policy for visitors here. All attendees must take the UCLA Covid Symptom Monitoring Survey, show proof of vaccination or a negative covid test, and wear a surgical or N/K95 mask (no cloth masks).
To join by Zoom, please click on this link. The password is myth

Emily Gowers | Brief Lives: The Case of Crispus
2022-03-07 17:00 - 18:30
For inquiries about attending this lecture on zoom, please contact purves@g.ucla.edu

Maria Wyke | "Feminizing Ancient Rome: Women at the Cinema from the 1900s to the 1920s"
2023-04-20 17:00 - 19:00
Audio / Visual Romans I
Thursday April 20th 2023

Annual UCLA Joan Palevsky Lecture
Professor Maria Wyke, University College London
“Feminizing Ancient Rome: Women at the Cinema from the 1900s to the 1920s“

The medium of the moving image started out as part of variety programmes and women often appeared in it advertising to men the pleasures of the new technology. However cinema soon began to give greater agency to women including in its reconstructions of the Roman world. Storylines gave women larger roles than those in the primary sources. Visual perspective, words and accompanying music worked to colour women’s stories in empathetic terms, from empresses to slaves. This lecture will explore some of those strategies for feminising Roman history and some of the reasons why they were developed.

Audio / Visual Romans II
Friday April 21st 2023

Film Screening with Live Accompaniment and Original Score by Michele Sganga
Cajus Julius Caesar, 1914. Directed by Enrico Guazzoni

A live screening at UCLA’s James Bridges Theater of the rarely seen yet remarkable Italian silent feature film Cajus Julius Caesar (1914, dir. Enrico Guazzoni) brought over especially from the archives of the Netherlands Film Institute and accompanied by an original score composed for the occasion by the noted concert pianist and composer Michele Sganga. Caesar’s life is presented in three movements: first romantic melodrama (his secret love for the beautiful Servilia); then triumph (his victory in Gaul); finally tragedy (death at the hands of his friends).

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Maria Wyke and Michele Sganga.

Film Screening of Cajus Julius Caesar (1914) with live accompaniment and original score by Michele Sganga
2023-04-21 16:00 - 19:00 | James Bridges Theater, 235 Charles E Young Dr E, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
Audio / Visual Romans II
Friday April 21st 2023

Film Screening with Live Accompaniment and Original Score by Michele Sganga
Cajus Julius Caesar, 1914. Directed by Enrico Guazzoni

A live screening at UCLA’s James Bridges Theater of the rarely seen yet remarkable Italian silent feature film Cajus Julius Caesar (1914, dir. Enrico Guazzoni) brought over especially from the archives of the Netherlands Film Institute and accompanied by an original score composed for the occasion by the noted concert pianist and composer Michele Sganga. Caesar’s life is presented in three movements: first romantic melodrama (his secret love for the beautiful Servilia); then triumph (his victory in Gaul); finally tragedy (death at the hands of his friends).

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Maria Wyke and Michele Sganga.

The Joan Palevsky Chair of Classics Inaugural Lecture, Mon. Oct. 16
2023-10-16 17:00 - 20:00 | Royce Hall 314, 10745 Dickson Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
The UCLA Department of Classics Presents The Joan Palevsky Chair of Classics Inaugural Lecture on Monday, October 16, 2023
Professor Kathryn Morgan will present her talk entitled Projecting the Past: Plato’s Historical Imagination in Royce 314 at 5:45 PM.
Please join us for a reception prior to the lecture in Royce 306 at 5 PM. All are welcome to attend.

Nandini Pandey | “The Colorblindness Gap: From Roman Diversity Beyond Affirmative Action?"
2024-04-25 17:00 - 19:00 | Fowler Museum
Annual UCLA Joan Palevsky Lecture
Professor Nandini Pandey, Johns Hopkins University
“The Colorblindness Gap: From Roman Diversity Beyond Affirmative Action?“

Naoíse Mac Sweeney | "The Birth of the Ancient Greek World: Migration, Urbanisation, and the Emergence of Greekness?"
2025-04-24 17:00 - 19:00 | Fowler Museum
Annual UCLA Joan Palevsky Lecture Professor
Naoíse Mac Sweeney, University of Vienna
“The Birth of the Ancient Greek World: Migration, Urbanisation, and the Emergence of Greekness?”
Lecture summary: By the start of the classical period, the Greek world stretched from Spain to Cyprus, and from Libya to the Crimea, and was comprised of over 1,000 autonomous polities. In this lecture, I will consider how this geographically dispersed and politically fragmented Greek world came into being over the course of the 11th to sixth centuries BCE, focusing in particular on new data from archaeological surveys designed to uncover processes of urbanisation and migration at varying scales. This new data suggests divergent pathways to Greekness in different parts of the Greek world, with the adoption of Greek lifestyles and cultural traits happening at radically different times and in response to different local contexts. If, as this evidence suggests, the Greek world was forged in a more piecemeal and uneven manner than previously thought, does this have implications for what we assume the Greek world fundamentally was?
About the speaker: Naoíse Mac Sweeney, professor of Greek archaeology at the University of Vienna, is the author of books including “Community Identity and Archaeology” (2011), “Foundation Myths and Politics in Ancient Ionia” (2013), “Troy: Myth, City, Icon” (2018) and, most recently, “The West: A New History of an Old Idea” (2023).
Kindly RSVP at collegeevents@support.ucla.edu.

Jennifer Trimble | "Monuments and meanings: ancient Roman damnatio memoriae and statue destructions today"
2026-05-01 16:00 - 18:30 | UCLA Faculty Club, Morrison Room, 480 Charles E Young Dr E, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
Annual UCLA Joan Palevsky Lecture
Associate Professor of Classics, Standford University
“Monuments and meanings: ancient Roman damnatio memoriae and statue destructions today”

SAVE THE DATE: Palevsky Lecture with guest speaker Julia Kindt
2027-04-20 16:00 - 18:30
Please save the date for the 2027 Palevsky Lecture with guest speaker Julia Kindt (The University of Sydney).
More details to follow.
