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.

The Workshop is organized and conducted entirely by Classics graduate students, and is multi-disciplinary in approach: sessions have been dedicated to papers on gender, epigraphy, literary theory, art history, linguistics, historiography, cultural history, and all topics in between. Inquiries about specific papers should be directed to the presenter, and general questions to Grant Hussong, the current organizer.

Sessions this Quarter (Spring 2023)

  • TBA

Previous Sessions

  • Zak Gram: “Diogenes of Oenoanda’s Criticism of Plato’s Psychology.”
  • Collin Moat: “The Visibility of Vesta: the Effect of Augustan Monuments on Viewsheds in the Roman Forum.”
  • Zak Gram: “Speaking of God: A Re-evaluation of Gregory of Nyssa’s Ad Ablabium.”
  • Collin Moat: “Burning Mortal Materials: the Transformation and Reassemblage of the Body in Homeric Funerals.”
  • Ben Davis: “Heads, Limbs, Trunks: Arboreal Anatomy and Body Horror in Lucan’s Bellum Civile.”
  • Mary Anastasi: “Parasites and Other Unexpected Intellectuals in the Epistles of Alciphron and Aelian.”
  • Grant Hussong: “The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes: Deleuze, Brakhage, and the Epicurean Philosophical Tradition.”
  • Mary Anastasi: “Diogenes of Oenoanda’s Monumental Letters.”
  • Mary Anastasi: “Endnotes: Closure and the End of Collection in Ad M. Caesarem et Invicem Book V.”
  • Grant Hussong: “The Sapphic Cyborg: Heroides 15.”
  • Lena Barsky: “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Caeneus? On Dido, Gender, and Virgil’s Accidental* Trans Narrative.”
  • Jasmine Akiyama-Kim: “Nero and the Imperial Double”
  • Collin Moat: “Sympathy with the Spear: Iliadic Tree Similes and Achilles’ Entanglement with the Pelian Spear”
  • Zak Gram: “”A Condemnation of Nature”: The Reception of Propatheia in Late Antiquity”
  • Patrick Callahan: “Pliny’s Epistolary Feast”
  • Andrew Lifland: “Class and Rhetoric in Philodemus’s On Music.”
  • Ben Daivs: “οὐ σάφα εἰδώς: Agency, Knowledge, and the Defense of Ignorance in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite and the Aeneid.”
  • Camille Acosta: “Death in the Siaspora: The Tomb of the Messenians in Athens.”
  • Zak Gram: “The Trajectory of Negative Theology in the Platonic Tradition.”
  • James Piper: “Physical Expressions of Emotion and Questions of Interpretation in Livy’s Third Decade.”
  • Tianran Liu: “Bestiality and Female Lust in the Roman and Chinese Novel.”
  • Zach Borst: “Mimesis and Metamorphosis in Euripides’ Bacchae.“
  • Ben Davis: “The Pastoral Motif and the Transformation of the Italian Landscape in Livy’s Third Decade.”
  • Rachel C. Morrison: “And who is my philos?: Redefining Friendship in Euripides’ Orestes.“
  • Andre Matlock: “Temporal Unevenness in Cicero’s De finibus bonorum et malorum“
  • Diana Librandi: “Mis(sed)recognitions. Identity and Civil War in Lucan’s Pharsalia“
  • Zach Borst: “Sappho’s Luminosity”
  • John Tennant: “Hitting ‘Wrong’ Notes? Pindar’s Improvisational Abundance & the Convention of Extemporaneous Performance”
  • Diana Librandi: “Hesiod and the Poetics of Hunger”
  • Zach Borst: “Empathy and Mimesis in Archaic & Classical Greek Literature”
  • Andre Matlock: “Following Doubt in Cicero’s Lucullus”
  • Tianran Liu: “Fertility, Sterility and Fluidity in Juvenal’s Satires“
  • Andrew Lifland: “Herodotus as Political Commentator?”
  • Diana Librandi: “Repetition Blindness: The Cyzicus Episode in Valerius Flaccus’s Argonautica“
  • Irene Han: “The Blood of Others: Plato’s Metabolē”
  • Grace Gilles: “A Tomb of One’s Own”
  • Douglas Fraleigh: “Power and Politeness in Aristophanic Comedy”
  • Deborah Sneed: “Physical Difference in Ancient Greek Thought, Art and Experience”
  • Summer Research Roundtable