Zofia Ahmad ’19 was accepted into the Central Eurasian Studies PhD program at the University of Indiana, Bloomington!

The Program in Classical and Medieval Studies, with the support of a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for curricular transformation, presents a Fall lecture series.
Critiquing the Field: White Supremacy, the Distant Past, and Coming Times.

March 14, 2022
– Maggie Williams, Professor of Art History, William Paterson University
“Celtic Crosses and The Myth of Whiteness”

April 11, 2022
– Chris Gregg, Associate Professor, Art History, George Mason University
“Building a Memory of Empire: Mussolini and the City of Rome”

May 4, 2022 at 7:15 ZOOM
Khameleon Productions presents “Uprooting Medea”

April 30, 2022 – 8AM to noon – Zoom

Professor O’Higgins and Gillies will be presenting on the following topics:
– “Women’s work in the Odyssey.” Presented by Dr. Laurie O’Higgins
– “Touring Homelessness in Martial’s Epigrams.” Presented by Dr. Grace Gillies

The Program in Classical and Medieval Studies, with the support of a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for curricular transformation, presents a Fall lecture series.
Critiquing the Field: White Supremacy, the Distant Past, and Coming Times.

October 27, 2021
– Fabio Frizzo, Professor de História Antiga na Universidade Federal do Triângulo Mineiro. Niterói, Brasil
“Learning Ancient Egypt in Brazilian Schools: What for?”
– Paulo Pachá, Professor de História Medieval no Instituto de História da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
“Where Do the Monsters Come From? Using and Abusing the Medieval Past in Brazil”

November 3, 2021
– Curtis Dozier, Assistant Professor of Greek and Roman Studies, Vassar College
“Not just ‘Twisted Minds’: The Challenge of White Ethnonationalist Classicism”
– Paul Sturtevant, The Public Medievalist and the Smithsonian Institution
“What Needs To Be Done, and How You Can Do It: Destructive Medievalisms Today and Tomorrow”

November 11, 2021
– Amy Kaufman, Independent scholar and professional writer
“City of Ruins: Tolerance and Extremism in Medieval Córdoba”
– Damon Berry, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, St. Lawrence University
“The Souls of [Medieval] White Folk”: American White Nationalists Imagining Medieval Europe

April 7, 2021
N. Kıvılcım Yavuz, “From Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages: The Trojan Narrative in Manuscripts.”

April 12, 2021
“The Music of Erollyn Wallen.”  A discussion between Tom Sapsford and Erollyn Wallen, Belize-born British composer.

April 19, 2021

May 3 2021
Rebecca Futo Kennedy,  “Race and Ethnicity in Greco-Roman Antiquity and Why it Matters Now.”

March 21, 2019 at 4:30pm – Pettengill G65

Dr. Jennifer Lorden, Grinnell College
“Rude Exclamations”: Beowulf, Identity, and the Making of Medieval English

Dr. Spencer Strub, Harvard University
“A Critical History of Adventure”

Moderated by Professor José Villagrana

Following the talks, all were invited to have lunch and casual conversation about pre-modern literary studies and the discourses of race, colonialism, and feminism.

This event was sponsored by English, African American Studies, and Classical and Medieval Studies.

March 22, 2019

This talk was given by Marie-Claire Beaulieu (Classics) and Anthony Bucci (Comuter Science) from Tufts University.

This interdisciplinary team sought to revitalized Glossary of Greek Birds (1895) by D’Arcy Thompson, who combined his expertise in biology with his passion for the classics by matching ancient Greek bird names with modern scientific identifications. Ms. Beaulieu and Mr. Bucci created a complete digital edition enhanced with discovery tools, based on Formal Concept Analysis (FCA), that showed the user connections that are latent in the work and that can prompt new research questions. The digital Glossary will serve as a reference work on ancient bird mythology and folklore and a springboard to explore Greek culture in general.

May 8, 2019

Hannah Friedman, Assistant Professor of Roman Archaeology at Texas Tech University, spoke on “The Site of Libarna and Roman Colonial Strategies” to the Bates Community.

May 13, 2019
Johannes (Hans) Wietzke, from Carleton College, MN, spoke to the Bates community on “Diagram as Exhortation to Philosophy: Aristotle’s Wondrous Cuttlefish.”

May 22, 2019 – Pettengill G65
The Classical and Medieval Studies Program invited the Bates community to a presentation by Grace, Gilles, Ph.D from the University of Arizona, on “At the Gates of the Subura: Martial and Street Culture.”

March 11, 2019
Rob Sanderson, the Getty Museum, “Strong Opinions, Weakly Held: The Digital Reinvention of a Medievalist”

September 29, 2018 – 220/221 Commons

THE INS AND OUTS OF ATHENS AND ROME
Hamish Cameron/moderator

9:00
The ‘Barbarian’ inside the Ancient Greek World
Sujatha Chandrasekaran, University of Oxford, 2012

9:40
Affecting Civil War: A Cognitive Approach to Roman History
Irene Morrison-Moncure, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, 2018

11:00
Patrons at Home, Patrons at Rome: Asian Cities and Associations of Roman Citizens
Sailakshmi Ramgopal, University of Chicago, 2016

11:40
Between Rome and Luoyang: Walls and Political Complexity in Roman and Chinese Capital Cities
JaShong King, University of Ottawa, expected 2021

_______________________________________________________
NEW GENRES/ANCIENT STORIES
Laurie O’Higgins/moderator

1:40
Afro-Brazilian Writers and the Classical Tradition
Andrea Kouklanakis, Harvard University, 2013

2:20
Pandora and Automata in the Film Ex Machina
Aleah Hernandez, University of California, Irvine, 2017

3:20
La Nouvelle Vague: The Liquid Feminine in Plato’s Republic
Irene Han, University of California at Los Angeles 2017

4:00
The Hype 4 Homer Project: Ancient Greek Poetry and the Need for a Hip-Hop Pedagogy.
Brandon Bourgeois, The Ohio State University 2018

5:00
Eta Sigma Phi hosts a reception for conferees in the Bates College Museum

September 20, 2018 – Pettengill G65

Professor Rebecca Sinos from Amherst College spoke on “The Greek Bold Leaves & the ‘Bafflement Beyond.”

She shared that inscribed gold leaves or “passports to the Underworld” were placed near the dead and offered instructions about how to navigate the afterlife.
This was a lecture for the Bates Community sponsored by the Classical and Medieval Studies.

Recent scholarship has sought to break down the old conception of the pre-modern world as being fixed and static by comparison to the global mobility and dynamism of the modern world. This lecture series seeks to illustrate some of the complex and mobile interconnections between the people of the pre-modern world. As Richard Bulliet and others have argues, communities on the “edge” of a group play a critical role in cultural change at the core. Accordingly, the talks in this series will address connections within border regions, connections that cross borders, local connections that contribute to global changes and global connections that contribute to local changes. The cross-border and intra-borderland mobility that comprised and allowed these global connections played a dynamic role in the present of the pre-modern world and in shaping the past of our self-consciously global world.

October 13, 2018 – Colleen Ho – “The Greatest Hits of Mongol History: Life, Death, and Chinggis Khan” and “The Unintended Legacy of the Middle Ages: White Supremacism’s Obsession with Medieval History”

November 9, 2018 – Taco Terpstra – “Trade in the Ancient Mediterranean: Private Order and Public Institutions”

Dr. Robert Sanderson, a semantic architect, spoke on “Strong Opinions, Weakly Held: The Digital Reinvention of a Medievalist.”

With a Ph.D. in French and History (University of Liverpool), Dr. Robert Sanderson discussed his continual self-reinvention from the time of his doctoral research in humanities to his work in the Computer Science Department at the University of Liverpool, to Stanford University Libraries, Los Alamos National Laboratory and J. Paul Getty Trust, He translated the specifics of his journey into more general thoughts on research outside of the academy, the nature of digital humanities, and the benefits of collaboration.

Sponsored by Classical and Medieval Studies, and Digital and Computational Studies.

November 7, 2018.
Amy Pistone, University of Notre Dame, “Fan Fiction, and Female Agency in Greek Tragedy,”

May 22, 2017

Author and journalist, Dr. Caroline Alexander, gave a lecture on “A Way with Words: On Translating Homer’s Iliad.” She studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and holds a doctoral degree in Classics from Columbia. Her 2015 translation of Homer’s Iliad has received high praise as “unembellished, faithful to the Greek, and uniquely accessible.”
She has published extensively and widely, including the best selling The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition (1998) and The War that Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War (2009).
Sponsored by the Classical and Medieval Studies Program with the support of the Costas and Mary Maliotis Foundation.

October 12, 2017 at 4:30 pm – Pettengill G65

Colleen C. Ho, from the Department of History at the University of Maryland, gave a lecture on “The Greatest Hits of Mongol History: Life, Death, and Chinggis Khan.”

The Mongol Empire left a complicated legacy in medieval Eurasian history. While the Mongols destroyed kingdoms and killed tens of thousands of people, they also facilitated political, economic, and religious connections across Eurasia. This talk analyzes the enigmatic figure of Chinggis Khan, highlights the Mongols’ interesting and unexpected appearances in modern culture, and presents the Mongols as nuanced players in world history.  

Sponsored by: The Interdisciplinary Studies Division; Center for Global Education; Departments of Anthropology, Art and Visual Culture, and History; Asian Studies, Religious Studies and Classical and Medieval Studies.

October 13, 2017 at noon – Commons 221

Colleen C. Ho from the History Department of the University of Maryland gave a talk on “The Unintended Legacy of the Middle Ages: White Supremacism’s Obsession with Medieval History.”

Sponsored by: The Interdisciplinary Studies Division; Center for Global Education; Departments of Anthropology, Art and Visual Culture, and History; Asian Studies, Religious Studies and Classical and Medieval Studies

October 21, 2017

Maine Classical Association Fall Conference “Fides” was held at Bates College.

One of the two lectures for the day was delivered by Bates Classical and Medieval Studies’ Professor Laurie O’Higgins.  Her talk was on “The Odyssey’s ‘Unfaithful’ Maidservants.”

The Maine Classical Association is a group of Latin teachers, Classics Professors, and other non-professional or retired citizens of Maine and beyond. Along with providing a network of Classicists in this great state, the MCA also puts on two meetings each year: one in the Fall designed around scholarship, and the other in the Spring on pedagogy.

November 9, 2017

Professor of Classics and History, Taco Terpstra, from Northwestern University talked on “Trade in the Ancient Mediterranean: Private Order and Public Institutions.”

Long-term archaeological data indicate that the ancient world, c.700 BCE – CE 700 went through a period of economic expansion and contraction. This period coincides with a time of pronounced state formation and consolidation, followed by collapse, leading to the question of what influence states had on economic development. The paper will argue that although states did not enforce property rights, they built institutions that were conducive to growth, especially the growth of long-distance trade.

Sponsored by: The Interdisciplinary Studies Division; Center for Global Education; Departments of Anthropology, Art and Visual Culture, and History; Asian Studies, Religious Studies, and Classical and Medieval Studies.

December 6, 2017

The movie Chi-raq was shown to a campus audience.

Summary: It is a clever riff on the Lysistrata of Aristophanes, but set in modern day Chicago, and confronting the horrors of gang violence there.  It is a reading of Arisophanes, and has provoked all sort of conversations (and some controversy) in the U.S.

After the viewing, Kevin Willmott, Professor of the University of Kansas, who co-wrote the screen play with Spike Lee, spoke about the making of the film.

Sponsored by the NEH Language Teaching Support Fund, the Program in Classical and Medieval Studies, the Maliotis Foundation, the Department of Rhetoric, with help also from the Division of Interdisciplinary Programs and the Division of Humanities.

Bates hosted the fall 2017 (October) meeting of the Maine Classicists.
Laurie O’Higgins gave a paper on the “Odyssey’s Unfaithful maidservants or Why does the Odyssey hate them so much?”

Borderlands lecture series, organized by Hamish Cameron.

October 12 – Colleen Ho, University of Maryland, “Greatest Hits of Mongol History”
October 13 – Colleen Ho also delivered “The Unintended Legacy of the Middle Ages: White Supremacism’s Obsession with Medieval History”
November 9 – Taco Terpstra, Northwestern University, spoke on “Trade in the Ancient
Mediterranean: Private Order and Public Institutions”

December 6, 2017
Kevin Wilmott, Professor of Film Studies at the University of Kansas, spoke to the Bates community following a showing of the movie, Chi-raq, which he had directed with Spike Lee.

April 29-May 1, 2016 – Commons 221-222

As Penelope weaves and unweaves a garment she intends as a shroud for Laertes, she delays a marriage promised to take place at its completion. More than this, Penelope seems to stall or reverse time. The object she creates is not preserved, but, like the proverbial witches of antiquity who call rivers back to their source, and seduce the moon from its home in the sky, Penelope’s weaving instead constructs time—as cyclical and recursive. For his part, Odysseus moves through time and space in an apparently linear fashion; one event or action leads inexorably to the next, even if themes and experiences repeat themselves. His adventures are recorded in epic verse: within the time/space of the poem, we hear his own account of them, and, with the advent of writing, they will become the material of history.
Homer’s Odyssey offers a meditation on how time is gendered and its consequences for social, literary, and historical enterprises outside of the epic. This conference examines how the experience of time was gendered in the ancient Greco-Roman Mediterranean through a range of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives.

Engendering Time in the Ancient Mediterranean, organized by Esther Eidinow (University of Nottingham, UK) and Lisa Maurizio (Bates College), has been generously supported by the Costas and Mary Maliotis Charitable Fund Foundation.
“This low relief frieze, ‘The Borghese Dancers,’ depicts a happy gathering of the Three Graces and Horae, the Goddesses of Time.”

Friday
Introductory Remarks And Welcome: Matthew Auer, Dean of Faculty, Bates College

Afternoon Panel
Moderator: Esther Eidinow, University of Nottingham, UK

1:30-2:15pm: Sappho’s Games and Gendered Temporality: Repetition and Interruption in Female Performance of Choral
Song, ANDROMACHE KARANIKA, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, CA
2:15-3:00pm: Atalanta and Sappho: Women In and Out of Time, KIRK ORMAND, OBERLIN COLLEGE, OH
3:30-4:15pm: “Feminizing” Time through Grammatical Gender in Pindar’s Epinicians, MARIA PAVLOU, UNIVERSITY OF CYPRUS, CY
4:15-5:00pm: Ritual Time and Restoration in Sophocles’ Trachiniae, TERESA YATES, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE, CA
6:00-8:00pm: A Mediterranean Feast followed by desserts and discussion with Stephanie Kelly-Romano on “Alien Abduction and Time”

Saturday

Morning Panel
Moderator: Jennifer Clark Kosak, Bowdoin College, ME

9:00-9:45am: The Poetics of Time: Plot and Pattern in Herodotus’s Narrative, ESTHER EIDINOW, NOTTINGHAM UNIVERSITY, UK
9:45-10:30am: Mortal Time, Divine Time, DEBORAH LYONS, MIAMI UNIVERSITY, OH
11:00-11:45am: Gender, Genre, and Time in Delphic Divination, LISA MAURIZIO, BATES COLLEGE, ME
11:45am-12:30pm: Festival and Ritual as Engendered Time in Ancient Greece: Chronological and Diachronic Time in Gendered and Non-Gendered Sacred Rites, MATTHEW P. DILLON, UNIVERSITY OF NEW ENGLAND, AU
12:30-1:30pm: Lunch In Commons

Afternoon Panel
Moderator: Barbara Weiden Boyd, Bowdoin College, ME

1:30-2:15pm: Delia’s Saturnian Day: The Puella and the Golden Age in Augustan Elegy, HUNTER GARDNER, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA, SC
2:15-3:00pm: Gendered Patterns: Constructing Time in the Communities of Catullus 64, AARON SEIDER, COLLEGE OF THE HOLY CROSS, MA
3:30-4:15pm: Static Father, Dynamic Daughter: Hunger and Time in Ovid’s Erysichthon Episode, ROBERT SANTUCCI, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, MD
6:00-8:00pm: A New England Feast

Sunday

Morning Panel
Moderator: Todd Berzon, Bowdoin College, ME

9:30-10:15am: Sosipatra, Destiny, and Death, CRYSTAL ADDEY, ST. ANDREWS UNIVERSITY, SCT
10:30-11:15am: (En)Gendering Christian Time: Female Saints and Roman Martyrological Calendars, NICOLA DENZEY LEWIS, BROWN UNIVERSITY, RI
11:15am-12:00pm: Telling Time with Epiphanius: Periodization and Metaphors of Genealogy and Gender in the Panarion, ELIZABETH CASTELLI, BARNARD COLLEGE, NY
12:00-1:00pm: Conference Brunch followed by a round table discussion

Conference concludes at 1:00pm

September 24, 2015 from 12:00 – 1:00 pm – Commons 226.

Many job openings for archaeologists today are in the field of cultural resource management. Employers may include consulting firms, engineering or environmental companies, state or federal government agencies, urban and city planning offices, or historic preservation societies. Kenneth Holyoke is an archaeologist with Stantec a large international engineering and environmental management firm. Based out of the Fredericton, New Brunswick office, he manages cultural resources management projects for compliance with provincial and federal legislation governing the identification, excavation, and analysis of archaeological sites that may be impacted by development projects. Please bring your lunch tray and learn about career paths in archaeology.

April 25 – 27, 2014
Bates College hosted the conference “Women’s Ritual Competence in the Ancient Mediterranean”.
This conference looked at a variety of women’s ritual activities, such as lamentation, prophecy, magical incantation, prayer, weaving and sacrifice.
To find out more about this conference, view the story, Conference at Bates explores women’s ritual activities in ancient times, from the Bates News.

The Mount David Summit is Bates’ annual campus-wide celebration of student academic achievement. The Summit highlights undergraduate research; student creative work in art, dance, theater, music and film/video; projects conducted in the context of academic courses; and community-engaged research. The Summit spotlights the rich intellectual life of our students. The event is sponsored by the Dean of the Faculty’s Office and the Student Research Program.


GOT PLAGUE?
No? Lucky you. Actually, the plague’s quite treatable nowadays. But if you were at the Mt. David Summit, you could have learned about what life was like back in plague days from students in Professor Federico’s Medieval London class.
https://vimeo.com/63116406

THE BACCHAE
Professor O’Higgins’ Greek class filmed two scenes from Euripides Bacchae for this year’s Mt. David Summit.  See what Dionysius has been up to!

October 29 – November 20, 2013

Three-part series on “Byzantium and Islam: Art, Poetry, and Sound at the Crossroads of the Mediterranean Sea.”

October 29, 2013:  “Venice, Byzantium, and Islam: Trade and the Arts in the Medieval Mediterranean” presented by Professor Maria Georgopoulou from the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, The Gennadeion.

November 14, 2013:  “Sicily: A Mediterranean Island at the Crossroads of Byzantium and Islam” presented by Professor Russell J. Hopley from Bowdoin College.

“Byzantium in Ottoman Clothing: Greeks of Istanbul and the Music of Rembetiko” presented by Professor Ali Humayum Akhtar from Bates College.  To view more about Professor Akhtar and his presentation, Bates College lectures to explore intersections of religion, trade, culture in Mediterranean, from the Bates News.

This lecture series was made possible with the generous support of the Maliotis Charitable Foundation in conjunction with the support of several divisions, departments, and programs at Bates College. Sponsored by the Program in Classical and Medieval Studies and the Department of Religious Studies

November 7th, 2013

Sandra L. Oliver, food historian and author shared the social history of food, past and present.
From her 19th century island farmhouse home on Islesboro, Maine, Sandra L. Oliver has been a prize-winning food historian. She is a contemporary food essayist, a writer for a weekly newspaper column, contributes frequently to magazines, travels widely as a nationally sought-after speaker, panelist, and food expert, writes books, gardens organically, cooks, and lives sustainably.

View story, Food historian to dish out history of Colonial, presidential cooking, from the Bates News.

Monday, October 8, 2012 @ 4:15 pm – 5:00 pm – Keck Auditorium, Pettengill Hall. Reception at 3:00 pm in 212 Pettengill.

Six Degrees of Pericles: Social Network Analysis for Ancient History presented by Diane Cline, University of Cincinnati.

Professor Cline is the Academic Program Director of UC Forward and Research Associate Professor in the Classics Department. She earned her Ph.D. at Princeton University and has held tenure at two different universities in two different disciplines (History, then Classics). Her book “Treasures of the Parthenon and Erechtheion” was published Oxford University (1996). After 9/11/2001, she worked in the U.S. Department of Defense and won the “Cryptologic Literature Award” for 2005. Since then she has returned to the academy as both a professor and an administrator.

Thursday, January 12, 2012 @ 4:15 pm – 5:00 pm – Keck Auditorium, Pettengill G52.
Reception at 3:00 pm in 212 Pettengill.

Reconstructing Girls’ Education in Ancient Greece: The Material Evidence presented by Professor Matthew Dillon, University of New England, Australia.

Thursday, January 26, 2012 @ 4:15 pm – 5:00 pm – Keck Auditorium, Pettengill G52. Reception at 3:00 pm in 212 Pettengill.

Beowulf’s Collectivities: Heroes, Hoards, and Horrors presented by Professor Mary Kate Hurley, Columbia University.

Monday, February 13, 2012 @ 4:15 pm – 5:00 pm – Keck Auditorium, Pettengill G52. Reception at 3:00 pm in 212 Pettengill.

Presented by Professor Judith P. Hallett, University of Maryland, Department of Classics.

Professor Judith Hallett received her BA from Wellesley College and her MA and PhD in Classical Philology from Harvard University. While attending Harvard, she studied at the American Academy in Rome; after receiving her doctorate she spent a year at the Institute of Classical Studies at the University of London. She was Blegen Visiting Scholar in Classics at Vassar College, and has held Mellon teaching fellowships at both Brandeis University and the Wellesley Center for Research on Women, and a research fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Winner of the College of Arts and Humanities Award for Excellence in Teaching, and honored by the Center for Excellence in Teaching Celebrating Teachers program in 1994 and 2002, she was named a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher in 1992-1993 and a Lilly-Center for Excellence in Teaching fellow in 2002-2003.

Author of “Fathers and Daughters in Roman Society: Women and the Elite Family” (Princeton 1984), she has edited and contributed to several collections of essays. Among them are “Six North American Women Classicists” (special issue of Classical World, 1996-1997), for which she wrote the featured article on Edith Hamilton; “Compromising Traditions: The Personal Voice in Classical Scholarship,” with Thomas Van Nortwick of Oberlin College (Routledge 1997); “Roman Sexualities,” with Marilyn Skinner of the University of Arizona (Princeton 1997); and “Rome and Her Monuments: Essays in Honor of the City and Literature of Rome in Honor of Katherine A. Geffcken,” with Sheila Dickison of the University of Florida (Wauconda, Illinois 2000). She is also the author of the four essays on classical Roman women writers in “Women Writing Latin” (Routledge 2002), and of chapters in books, articles, reviews and translations into both English and classical Latin.