Department of Classics - UCLA

"Is it bad to be poor? Metrodorus vs. Menander in Philodemus’ On Wealth II” | David Blank
2021-02-19 12:00 - 13:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Zoom
There is a password on this Zoom meeting; please contact sshapiro@humnet.ucla.edu if you need the password.

Classics 51B Material Culture Club
2021-02-12 16:00 - 17:00 | Zoom
The objectively awesome Classics 51B Material Culture Club is back! Please join us for a casual conversation led by 51b’s TA Jasmine Akiyama-Kim. This session will explore the turbulent year following Nero’s death, in which four claimants to the throne must articulate their relationship to the absent Julio-Claudian emperor. Join us on Friday, Feb. 12th at 4PM via Zoom. All are undergraduate students are welcome! To join the discussion, please access this Zoom link: https://ucla.zoom.us/my/romanarcheo. We hope to see you there!

"Despotics: Theory and Practice of Domination in the Ancient Agronomists" | Joe Howley
2021-02-12 12:00 - 13:00

CMRS Work-in-Progress Happy Hour with Prof. Adriana Vazquez
2021-02-10 17:00 - 18:00
“The Influence of Vergil’s Epic Program on Gabriel Pereira de Castro’s Poem Ulisseia ou Lisboa Edificada (1636)”

CMRS is hosting twice-monthly Works-in-Progress Happy Hours to promote intellectual exchange and collegiality while most of us are continuing to work and learn remotely. The Happy Hours are open to UCLA faculty and graduate students and consist of a short informal presentation followed by open discussion.
Open to faculty and graduate students. Invitations to register for the Zoom link will be sent by email. Please reach out to CMRS if you have any questions: cmrs@humnet.ucla.edu.

“Commenting on Iliad 1.223-291” | Seth Schein
2021-02-08 12:00 - 13:00
*There is a password on this account; please contact sshapiro@humnet.ucla.edu if you need the password.

"Know Thyself: Ancient Proverbs and the Road to Wisdom” | Kathryn Morgan
2021-02-07 14:00 - 17:00
Professor Kathryn Morgan, UCLA Department of Classics, lectures on “Know Thyself: Ancient Proverbs and the Road to Wisdom,” (as part of International Greek Language Day).
Kathryn Morgan is Professor of Classics in the Department of Classics at UCLA. Her interests range broadly over Greek literature of the fifth and fourth centuries BC. She regularly teaches graduate seminars in Attic tragedy, Pindar and Greek lyric, and Plato, and her research oscillates between projects connected with Plato and with Pindar. The former is represented by her book Myth and Philosophy from the Presocratics to Plato, and by her ongoing involvement in the series Studies in Ancient Greek Narrative (published by Brill), where she is responsible for the chapters covering Plato. Pindar is the subject of her most recent book, Pindar and the Construction of Syracusan Monarchy in the Fifth Century B.C. (2015), where she examines Pindar’s victory odes for Hieron of Syracuse and the program of tyrannical self-representation to which they contributed. Ongoing research includes book projects on Plato’s conception of history and on historical narrative in the Persians of Aeschylus. She has served on the Program Committee and the Board of Directors of the Society for Classical Studies, and is currently a member of the Nominating Committee.
The event will be offered on Zoom.
RSVP to shorturl.at/uHLTW to receive the link.

Classics 51B Material Culture Club
2021-02-05 15:00 - 16:00 | Zoom: https://ucla.zoom.us/my/romanarcheo
The objectively awesome Classics 51B Material Culture Club is back! Please join us for a casual conversation led by 51b’s TA Rachel Wood who will analyze imagery of captured peoples on Roman triumphal arches found in modern-day France on Friday, Feb. 5th at 3PM via Zoom. All are undergraduate students are welcome! To join the discussion, please access this Zoom link: https://ucla.zoom.us/my/romanarcheo. We hope to see you there!

Graduate Student Workshop | James Piper
2021-02-03 17:00 - 18:00 | Zoom
Graduate Workshop
February 3rd – “Physical Expressions of Emotion and Questions of Interpretation in Livy’s Third Decade” by James Piper

The UCLA Classics Graduate Workshop is a bi-weekly seminar for graduate students in Classics and related fields; the purpose of the workshop is to provide a venue in which graduate scholars can showcase their ongoing research and receive useful commentary from their peers in an informal setting.To see upcoming sessions this quarter, visit Graduate Workshop.

Classics 51B Material Culture Club
2021-01-29 13:00 - 14:00
The objectively awesome Classics 51B Material Culture Club is back! Please join us for a casual conversation led by 51b’s Professor Sarah Beckmann who will unpack the “mysteries” of the Villa of the Mysteries fresco on Friday, Jan. 29th at 1PM via Zoom. All are undergraduate students are welcome! To join the discussion, please access this Zoom link: https://ucla.zoom.us/my/romanarcheo. We hope to see you there!

"Slave Cooks and Roman Comedy: Resistance in the Kitchen" | Amy Richlin
2021-01-25 12:00 - 13:00

Graduate Student Workshop | Zak Gram
2021-01-20 17:00 - 18:00
Graduate Workshop
January 20th – “The Trajectory of Negative Theology in the Platonic Tradition” by Zak Gram

The UCLA Classics Graduate Workshop is a bi-weekly seminar for graduate students in Classics and related fields; the purpose of the workshop is to provide a venue in which graduate scholars can showcase their ongoing research and receive useful commentary from their peers in an informal setting.To see upcoming sessions this quarter, visit Graduate Workshop.

SCS Practice Talks
2020-12-16 03:00 - 17:00 | Zoom
These practice talks will feature three current Graduate Students. The titles of their talks are listed below.

Jasmine Akiyama-Kim – “Ring Composition and Narrative Consequence in the Story of Rhampsinitus and the Thief (Hdt. 2.121)”
Zach Borst – “Mimesis as Metamorphosis in Aristophanes’ Acharnians”
Diana Librandi – “Repetition Blindness: The Cyzicus Episode in Valerius Flaccus’s Argonautica”

"Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus: A Monumental History of the Black Atlantic" | Mathura Umachandran
2020-12-07 12:00 - 13:00
Image for flyer – “The Birth of Oshun” (2018), Harmonia Rosales.

Graduate Student Workshop | Zach Borst
2020-12-02 17:00 - 18:30
Graduate Workshop
The UCLA Classics Graduate Workshop is a bi-weekly seminar for graduate students in Classics and related fields; the purpose of the workshop is to provide a venue in which graduate scholars can showcase their ongoing research and receive useful commentary from their peers in an informal setting.
To see upcoming sessions this quarter, visit Graduate Workshop.

Irene Han & Ella Haselswerdt in conversation: “Lesbian Sappho”
2020-11-30 12:00 - 13:00
Please contact Savannah Shapiro (sshapiro@humnet.ucla.edu) for Zoom link.

“Writing from the end of the Iliad”: the Scriptor Cyclicus in the Ars Poetica | Jennifer Weintritt
2020-11-09 12:00 - 13:00
Zoom Meeting ID: 3131 1616 94
OR
Zoom Link: https://ucla.zoom.us/my/alexpurves

Password: [REDACTED]

"A Future for Old Age in Cicero's de Senectute." | Andre Matlock
2020-10-19 12:00 - 13:00 | https://ucla.zoom.us/j/92259904483
Zoom Link: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/92259904483

UCLA SNF Center-Benaki Museum Lecture on Classical Greek Marriage Rituals
2020-06-11 10:00 - 12:00
Please join The UCLA SNF Center on Thursday, June 11th for a lecture on Classical Greek marriage rituals by Irini Papageorgiou. Irini is the Curator of the Department of Prehistoric, Ancient Greek, and Roman Collections at the Benaki Museum.
To receive a Zoom link for this lecture, please RSVP to hellenic@humnet.ucla.edu

Finding Atlantis | Kathryn Morgan
2020-04-26 15:00 - 17:00
This talk (offered on Zoom) by Professor Kathryn Morgan, Chair of the UCLA Department of Classics, explores the origins and some of the development of the myth of the lost island of Atlantis, from Plato to contemporary video games. This legend has fascinated its audiences since it first appeared in the works of the philosopher Plato, and like all good myths it reflects the concerns of the society that created it. It is a story about the kind of society that want to live in, about the effect upon civilizations of imperial ambition, about how we deal with the sea as a medium for economic and cultural exchange. In the hands of modern geographers, explorers, and other scholars, the myth has become something different: a symbol of the mysterious past that we can never quite control.
You must RSPV at hellenic@humnet.ucla.edu to be included in this event. We welcome attendance by students, community members, and your family members outside of Los Angeles.

Spring Events Cancelled
2020-03-19 - 2020-06-13
Due to university measures to restrict the spread of the COVID-19 virus, we must, regretfully, cancel all in-person spring events.

"On the Good King According to Vergil" | Alison Keith
2020-02-19 16:00 - 18:00

"The Cultural Catalogue in Attic Tragedy" | Joshua Billings
2020-02-10 17:00 - 19:00

Symposium: A Celebration of International Greek Language Day
2020-02-09 14:00 - 19:00 | Royce Hall 314, 10745 Dickson Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
Symposium: International Greek Language Day | Sunday, February 9
Abstracts of talks
Brent Vine (UCLA). Greek in the Bronze Age: Linear B and Mycenaean Greek.
2:10-2:50pm
Almost unique among languages of the world, the Greek language provides continuous written documentation over a span of more than three millennia, and has retained its identity as “Greek” for most of that period. For Greek in the Bronze Age: the 1952 decipherment of the Linear B script was one of the most exciting developments in the 20th-century study of language and linguistics, as well as Classical studies. Yet there are some widespread misconceptions about the documents in Mycenaean Greek (the language of the Linear B texts): one often hears, for example, that these texts are so fragmentary and recorded in such dull formats (almost all of them are lists, and they are filled with personal names) that they preserve little of interest. In this presentation, we will take a close look at Linear B and some of the documents in Mycenaean Greek, so as to illustrate the remarkable interest of this early form of the Greek language and the information it offers us — not only about the history of the Greek language, but also about early Greek and Ancient Mediterranean culture.
Maria Mavroudi (UC Berkeley). Towards a New History of Byzantine Philosophy.
2:50-3:30pm
Almost thirty years ago, the historian of medieval philosophy Alain de Libera explained that Byzantine philosophy is “poorly understood, frequently scorned, little studied, and never translated”. Today, philosophy remains one of the least cultivated fields within Byzantine studies. Claims that it is, at best, an inferior by-product of ancient Greek philosophy, continue to be articulated. The lecture will explain how the modern study of the history of philosophy led to such a conclusion, and what place philosophy occupied within Byzantine literary culture.
Nikolaos Panou (Stony Brook University). Specters of Byzantium: Language and Ideology in Early Modern Greek Advice Literature.
3:40-4:20pm
This presentation will focus on the reception of Byzantine imperial ideology in the late seventeenth century and its textual uses as a key element for the representation and legitimization of sovereignty in the semi-independent Danubian Principalities at the northern periphery of the Ottoman Balkans. Produced by Greek-speaking authors under the auspices of increasingly powerful Orthodox rulers, the texts under consideration were designed to serve specific propagandistic agendas but in doing so they also contributed both to an intense process of interethnic contact and to a reconfiguration of fundamental moral and political concepts in the region at a crucial point in its history.
Katerina Stergiopoulou (Princeton University). ‘What These Ithacas Mean’: Reading Cavafy’s Greek.
4:20-5:00pm
Critics and translators have often noted the richness of diction in the work of modernist Greek poet C.P. Cavafy’s (1863-1933), as well as his frequent shifts between registers of Modern Greek; as David Ricks puts it, “Cavafy’s modernity resides so essentially in his refusal to reduce the incongruent or even competing idioms of Greek, in all its longevity, to a single idiom.” In my paper I will be thinking about this question of idiom through the often-neglected lens of Cavafy’s use of (sometimes lengthy) citations from classical and postclassical Greek texts. I will be arguing that the implications of these citations—which range from Aeschylus to Plutarch to Byzantine authors—go beyond his peculiar and masterful melding of registers. For Cavafy brings his carefully and idiosyncratically constructed Greek idiom face to face with older incarnations of the Greek language in the very poems in which he poses the question of Hellenism. While closely examining the linguistic texture of these poems and their importance for our understanding of Cavafy’s historical poetics and linguistic politics, I will also be placing Cavafy’s work in a broader context of twentieth-century poetic practice.

"Between πάθος and μάθος: Trauma and the Choral Subject in Aeschylus' Agamemnon" | Ella Haselswerdt
2020-02-03 17:00 - 19:00

"Lucian's Praise of the Fatherland and the Meaning of Samosata.” | Stephen Kidd
2020-01-30 17:00 - 18:30

"The Circulation of Medical Knowledge in Late Antiquity" | Jessica Wright
2020-01-23 17:00 - 18:30

"A Renaissance for Renaisaance Virgil Commentaries" | Craig Kallendorf
2020-01-16 16:15 - 18:00

“My Own Private Kastellorizo” | UCLA Regents’ Lecture by Fotini Baxevani
2020-01-12 15:00 - 18:00 | Royce Hall 314, 10745 Dickson Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States

Film Screening | "When Tomatoes Met Wagner"
2019-12-09 19:30 - 23:00 | James Bridges Theater, 235 Charles E Young Dr E, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
Please join us for a special film screening hosted by the UCLA Stavros Niarchos Foundation Center for the Study of Hellenic Culture, led by Director and Professor Sharon Gerstel. This screening features When Tomatoes Met Wagner, the official Greek submission for Best International Feature Film at the 2020 Academy Awards.

Film Screening | "A Touch of Spice"
2019-11-20 17:30 - 20:30 | James Bridges Theater, 235 Charles E Young Dr E, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
We are proud to offer a screening of A Touch of Spice by our distinguished professor and UCLA alumnus Tassos Boulmetis! Free and open to the public.
