Graduate Student Workshop | Collin Moat
2022-02-24 17:00 - 18:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
Graduate Workshop
Thursday, February 24th at 5 PM – “Sympathy with the Spear: Iliadic Tree Similes and Achilles’ Entanglement with the Pelian Spear” by Collin Moat

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.

Department Brownbag talk | Sarah Beckmann, "The Paradox of Filial Piety: Pero and Micon in Roman Arts"
2022-02-25 12:00 - 13:00

Pierre Destrée | Why (and How) Should a Platonist Laugh at Eros? Humor and Love in the Symposium
2022-03-02 12:00 - 13:30
https://cmrs.ucla.edu/event/sissa-seminar-winter2022-destree/
Please click on the link above for registration details.

Classical Society Meeting: Wax in Antiquity
2022-03-03 12:00 - 13:30 | Dodd 232
Please join us for the first Classical Society meeting Thursday, March 3, 2022 from 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM in Dodd 232 to discuss wax in antiquity! We will feature presentations from Professor Beckmann about the Roman imagines and Professor Papadopoulos about Minoan and Mycenaean seals and sealings!
Afterwards, we will create our own wax seal impressions on Italian stationery, following a more modern practice of making wax seal impressions. Participants will be able to choose from a variety of colorful waxes, elegant stationeries, elaborate stamps, decorative string, and brilliant imitation gold, rose gold, and silver leaf to create their own uniquely embellished sealed envelope which they will be able to take home.

Alexander Beecroft | Contactless Comparison
2022-03-07 12:00 - 13:00
On zoom. Please register for this event and find further info here.

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

On Outgroups and Muted Groups: A Conference in Honor of Amy Richlin
2022-04-02 | Meyer and Renee Luskin Conference Center, UCLA, 425 Westwood Plaza, Los Angeles, California, 90095
Professor Amy Richlin will be retiring at the end of the coming academic year. We look forward to celebrating her path-breaking career and reuniting with her many UCLA students at this conference in her honor. The conference will take place on April 2nd in the Legacy Room at the UCLA Meyer and Renee Luskin Conference Center. There will also be a reception in Dodd on Friday night and a party off campus on Saturday. If you are planning to attend the conference, please register using the form below.

Please note that this conference will take place in person (not on zoom).
To see a schedule of papers please scroll down.
RSVP Form

Saturday April 2nd, 2022, Luskin Conference Center, UCLA
9-9:30: Coffee
9:30-11:15 Panel 1, Legacy AB Room: Comedy and Satire
Conference welcome: Alex Purves
Moderator: Tianran Liu
Hans Bork (PhD 2018), Stanford University, “The Artistry of Insult in Plautus”
Brian Walters (PhD 2011) University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, “Womanly Vomicae”
Kristin Mann (PhD 2015), Indiana University, “Hens, Eunuchs, and Goddesses: Teaching Jokes in Phaedrus’s Fabulae”
Elliott Piros (PhD 2019), CSU Northridge & UCLA, “Painted Faces in Martial’s Epigrams”
11:30-12:30 Lunch
12:45-2:30 Panel 2, Legacy AB Room: History
Moderator: Mary Anastasi
Anthony Vivian (PhD 2018), UCLA, “Slippery Athenians”
Nathan Kish (PhD 2018), Tulane University, “Xenophobia and Violence in Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita”
Mik Larsen (PhD 2015), CSU Long Beach, “Public Abuse and the Problem of Speech in Roman Declamation”
Caroline Cheung (Post Bacc 2009), Princeton University, “Dangerous Work”
Henry Gruber (Post Bacc 2015) Harvard University, “Recovering Armentaria, Mother of Gregory of Tours, through her Favorite Miracles”
2:30-3:00 Coffee
3:00-4:30 Panel 3, Legacy AB Room: Gender and the Body
Moderator: Rachel Morrison
Celsiana Warwick (PhD 2018), University of Iowa, “Homoerotic Heroes and the Anxieties of Masculinity” [Zoom]
Hilary Lehmann (PhD 2016), Knox College, “Antigone and the Egyptians: Sex and Other Commodities in Hypereides’ Against Athenogenes”
Suzanne Lye (PhD 2016) UNC Chapel Hill, “Rage Becomes Her: Angry Women and Cursed Bodies”
Katie Tardio (Post Bacc 2014) UNC Chapel Hill, “Esse Quam Videri: Role Playing as a Pedagogical Tool”
4:30-4:45 Wrap-up: Robert Gurval
Professor Richlin writes:
As I look towards retirement in June 2022 after 45 years of teaching, I am honored by the department’s decision to hold a conference for me. Its theme, “On Outgroups and Muted Groups,” comes from the self-description on my UCLA webpage, and well describes the work that has occupied me for all these years of writing history from below. I began from the study of Roman satire which led me, to my surprise, into the then brand-new field of the history of sexuality and made me into an outspoken feminist. I was lucky enough to begin this work in the heyday of Second Wave feminism, and, thanks to the supportive network of the Women’s Classical Caucus and the quadrennial “Feminism and Classics” conferences, I had a lot of people to talk to. After jobs at Rutgers, Dartmouth, and Lehigh, I moved to USC in 1989, teaching jointly in Classics and Gender Studies, which meant that my Classics students read a lot of feminist theory and my Gender Studies students learned a lot about antiquity. At UCLA, from 2005 onwards, I have taught graduate seminars in “Roman History and the Theory of History,” satire, comedy, epistolography, ancient sexuality, and Roman women’s history, with undergraduate courses to match, while serving from 2011 onwards as director of the post-bacc program. All of this goes to explain why I wanted my dear students to be the speakers at this final conference, for in teaching them I have learned a great deal. They will be returning from where their far-flung jobs have taken them, to speak here on history, comedy, satire, and gender, and tell me something new, as they always do.

Friends of Ancient History Spring Meeting
2022-04-09 10:00 - 14:30
The Friends of Ancient History is a loose network of faculty and graduate students across south California institutions, who meet a couple of times a year, at one venue or another.
On Saturday 9th April we are hosting it here, at UCLA, and the speakers are
Lydia Spielberg (UCLA) on “The Emperor’s Words in History and Biography”
and
Mark Letteney (USC Postdoc) on “The Archaeology of Incarceration in Roman Antiquity.”
The programme is 10-10:30, first talk 10:30-11:15, discussion till noonish, then lunch, then the second paper 12:45, finish discussion by 2:15-ish, and we are doing it in Royce 306 with lunch on the balcony.
UCLA classics graduates and post-baccs would be very welcome to come for all or part of this.
Details here
For COVID ‘n catering reasons those coming need to sign up at
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/THB8VRL
set up by Professor Chew at CSULB.
The cost for catering is $25 for faculty and $10 for grad students, but UCLA grads and post baccs get a 100% discount.

UCLA Department of Classics Joan Palevsky Lecture | Dr Jennifer Stager, "Cut from the Womb: Towards a Feminist History of Ancient Greek Medicine”
2022-04-21 17:00 - 19:00 | Fowler Museum
The UCLA Classics Department is pleased to announce that the Joan Palevsky Lecture in Classics for 2022 will be delivered by Jennifer Stager, Assistant Professor of History of Art at Johns Hopkins University.
Taking its title from the god Asklepios’s violent birth (Pindar Pythian 3) and the priorities that this myth set for ancient Greek medicine, in this talk Jennifer Stager will explore the construction of a patrilineal genealogy of ancient medicine back to the god Asklepios, as well as a counter history to this genealogy connected with the goddess Hygeia. Written medical texts and visual representations staged ties between the doctor and Asklepios, eventually co-opting Hygeia’s position. Analyzing visual representations of healers and medical tools, as well as epigraphic, literary, and philosophical texts connected to healing practices, Professor Stager will trace the often violent construction of this patrilineal genealogy alongside its counter history.
All are very welcome to attend this event, which will be held in person. Please RSVP here.
Image caption: Images of surgical tools inside an open case flanked by cupping vessels carved onto a marble base. Marble. c. 320 BCE, Athens NAM 1378

May 2022 events
2022-05-01 08:00 - 2022-06-01 17:00

Sheila Murnaghan | Taming the Extraordinary: Shifting Motives and the Psychology of Tragic Actors
2022-05-05 17:00 - 18:30

Luca Benelli
2022-05-09 16:00 - 18:00

Greg Woolf | Losing Control of the Gods: How Religion Slipped out of the Hands of Men in the Early Roman Empire
2022-05-12 17:00 - 18:00
co-sponsored with the Center for Religion and the Department of History

Rosa Andújar | Philological Reception and the Repeating Odyssey in the Caribbean
2022-05-16 16:00 - 17:30
This lecture discusses La Odilea by Francisco Chofre, a Cuban prose adaptation of the Odyssey, which refigures both Homer’s heroes as guajiros (peasants) and the ancient epic itself through the adoption of an oral Cuban dialect. My examination first highlights Chofre’s meticulous linguistic transformations, which I consider a model of “philological” reception, as well as the ambiguous and complex relationship that Chofre posits between his work and the ancient epic, one which oscillates between irreverence and veneration of Homer. I then explore the broader questions that this text poses regarding vernacularity and canon, as well as their implications in La Odilea’s two main contexts: the Cuban Revolution and the postcolonial Caribbean. Chofre’s novel reveals the Odyssey’s unique resonance across the Caribbean while also challenging existing models of classical reception.

Barbara L. Packer Lectures: Yopie Prins | Anne Carson [ ] Sappho
2022-05-17 17:00 - 18:30 | Kaplan 193 and on Zoom
Join UCLA English for the Barbara L. Packer Lectures featuring Yopie Prins, the Irene Butter Collegiate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan.
In If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (2002), Anne Carson famously uses brackets [ ] in her translations from Greek to English, to mark what is missing from the Sapphic fragments and also to imply “a space for imaginal adventure.” In her talk, Professor Prins looks more closely at how the bracket itself is translated in Carson’s reworking of Sappho in other media: a hand-painted mini-book, the environmental installation of “Cliff Sappho,” and a performance piece entitled “BRACKO.”
Register here for onsite attendance in Kaplan Hall 193 or online attendance on Zoom.
Co-sponsored by UCLA Department of Classics.
Yopie Prins is the Irene Butter Collegiate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Victorian Sappho (1999) and Ladies’ Greek: Victorian Translations of Tragedy (2017) and co-editor, with Virginia Jackson, of The Lyric Theory Reader (2014).
Per UCLA COVID-19 protocols, all attendees are required to complete the UCLA COVID-19 Symptom Monitoring Survey in order to enter the event. Masks are strongly recommended for attendees who are up to date on vaccinations, and they are required for attendees who are not up to date on vaccinations.
Questions about the event? Contact Marta Wallien, Programs and Media Manager at mwallien@english.ucla.edu

Erich Gruen | Antisemitism in the Pagan World
2022-05-18 16:00 - 17:00 | Royce Hall 306
Co-sponsored with the Center for Religion and the Department of History.
This event will be hybrid. To receive an email with the Zoom link to attend remotely, please RSVP at https://religion.ucla.edu/event/antisemitism-in-the-pagan-world/

Barbara L. Packer Lectures: Yopie Prins | Reversing Classical Meters
2022-05-19 17:00 - 18:30 | Kaplan 193 and on Zoom
Join UCLA English for the Barbara L. Packer Lectures featuring Yopie Prins, the Irene Butter Collegiate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan.
In her talk, Professor Prins asks what is the past and future of classical models for English versification? Nineteenth-century ideas about the revival of classical meters in English poetry prompted a wide range of metrical experiments in Victorian England and America: strange attempts to translate quantitative classical verse into English accentual-syllabic verse, and conversely, to translate English verse into Greek and Latin meters. Was this a dead-end for Victorian prosody? How might we read the reversing of Classical meters today?
Register here for onsite attendance in Kaplan Hall 193 or online attendance on Zoom.
Co-sponsored by UCLA Department of Classics.
Yopie Prins is the Irene Butter Collegiate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Victorian Sappho (1999) and Ladies’ Greek: Victorian Translations of Tragedy (2017) and co-editor, with Virginia Jackson, of The Lyric Theory Reader (2014).
Per UCLA COVID-19 protocols, all attendees are required to complete the UCLA COVID-19 Symptom Monitoring Survey in order to enter the event. Masks are strongly recommended for attendees who are up to date on vaccinations, and they are required for attendees who are not up to date on vaccinations.
Questions about the event? Contact Marta Wallien, Programs and Media Manager at mwallien@english.ucla.edu

James Uden | The Politics of Pathos in Virgil's Aeneid
2022-05-23 16:00 - 17:30
Virgil’s particular attention to human suffering has long been identified as a defining aspect of his poetry, but critics have had widely different views on the politics of Virgilian pathos. Is empathy for the defeated in the Aeneid a way of undermining the triumphalist claims of Augustus (e.g. Putnam 1965)? Or does the poem’s famous melancholy in fact encourage its readers to accept the losses they endure, thereby neutralizing anger and resistance (Habinek 1998)? Drawing inspiration from Judith Butler’s essay collection Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, this paper proposes a different way forward. Rather than celebrating the victory of one side over the other, Virgil encourages us to understand our shared vulnerability to injury as a foundation for political community. At the same time, not every character in the epic is judged worthy of the same empathy and grief, and the poet thereby sharpens our attention to those whom society has deemed less “grievable”. Virgilian pathos, I argue, is not the poet’s insular, subjective response to the society around him; it is a political vision grounded in a close attention to the precarity of others’ lives.

Classics MA Papers
2022-06-01 15:00 - 17:00 | Dodd 247
Liam Albrittain, “Sapphic Brushstrokes: Systems of Color and Visual Contrast in Sappho, Hesiod and Homer”
Mary K. Anastasi, “Endnotes: Closure and the End of a Collection in Fronto’s Ad Marcum Caesarem et Invicem Book 5”
Julianna Lewis, “The Antithesis of Elegy: Hands in Ovid’s Amores”
Unfortunately, given recent adjustments in campus Covid-related policies and recommendations, we will NOT be holding a post-event celebration in the Faculty Lounge. We regret this very much, but hope this won’t depress attendance at the presentations themselves.

Departmental Graduation Celebration
2022-06-11 13:30 - 14:30 | Coral Tree Walkway

Graduate Student Orientation
2022-09-20 09:00 - 11:00
Dodd 248. Orientation to the MA & PhD in Classics for all new graduate students

Postbacc Luncheon
2022-09-20 13:00 - 14:00
Dodd 248: Welcome luncheon and orientation for the entering class of Post-baccalaureate students in Classics.

TA Orientation
2022-09-21 10:00 - 12:00
Orientation for all students TA-ing in the Classics department 22-23. Dodd 248. Please arrive promptly.

Getty Villa Play: Deaf West Theater's Oedipus
2022-09-21 16:00 - 19:00
Undergraduate, graduate and postbacc students are warmly invited to attend the free matinee performance of Oedipus the King by Deaf West Theater Company at the Getty Villa. Please contact Neli Petrosyan (npetrosyan@humnet.ucla.edu) if you are interested in attending this event. A limited number of tickets are available.
https://www.getty.edu/news/deaf-west-theatre-debuts-at-getty-villas-outdoor-theatre-with-a-fresh-take-on-sophocles-oedipus/

Undergraduate Open House
2022-09-26 13:00 - 14:00
Come and meet other students and faculty from the Classics Department at an informal mixer before classes begin! Learn more about the Classics department and the Classics club. Dodd 248 / outside in front of Dodd Hall (place will be confirmed nearer the time).

Classics & PIES Fall Reception
2022-09-30 16:00 - 18:00 | Coral Tree Walkway
Please join us for our beginning of year reception and for the awarding of the Helen Caldwell Prizes in Beginning Greek and Latin.

Johanna Hanink | Bones, stones, trees and roots: On the enduring urgency of Karkavitsas' Archaeologist (1904)
2022-10-01 10:00 - 11:00
This is a Stavros Niarchos Foundation Center for the Study of Hellenic Culture event co-sponsored by the Department of Classics. It will take place on Zoom. Please see attached flyer for registration details.

Lydia Spielberg | Speeches, Dicta, and Livy's Scipio Problem
2022-10-03 12:00 - 13:00
Brownbag lunchtime workshop.
Dodd 248, 12-1. All welcome!

Karen ní Mheallaigh | The Thulean zone: ancient science, fiction and the Arctic imaginaire
2022-10-13 16:00 - 17:30
Professor Karen Ní Mheallaigh, Johns Hopkins University. Graduate Student Elected Speaker 22-23. All welcome.
**Please note time change: this lecture now begins at 4pm.
Image: Sandra Meech, Arctic Expressions
sandrameech.com

Brownbag Talk: Julio Vega-Payne, “Earth, water, and the uncertain (human) future in the Iliad"
2022-10-24 12:00 - 13:00
Dodd 248, 12-1. All welcome!
