Spring 2025

CLST 07  First-Year Seminar: From Athens to the Americas: Tragedy Crossing the Atlantic  This course explores Attic tragedy's life and legacy ·in the plays and films of Latin America. We will investigate why a genre originally performed to celebrate a god in a small city in a small corner of the Aegean has made such an impact throughout thousands of years of re­performance, re-interpretation, and renovation. We will read Greek plays (in translations) as well as adaptations and re-imaginings from throughout history with special attention to the works produced across Latin America in the 20th and 21st centuries. Along the way we will hone our skills of observation, interrogation, argumentation, editing, and research through a variety of writing assignments. Foxley  

CLST 10.03 Mind, Heart, Brain. Considers some of the earliest recorded theories of human and animal psychology worked out in Greco-Roman antiquity. What physical substances and/or bodily organs give rise to the characteristic functions of living things, such as sense perception, self-movement, and self-awareness? How it is that human beings are capable of concept formation, reasoning, memory, and emotion, and to what extent are these capacities also present in non-human animals? Is the mind-stuff radically distinct from the body and its afflictions, or intimately bound to it? Students work collaboratively to develop their own analyses of these and related issues in a range of philosophical, scientific, and medical texts from both Greece and Rome. TMV, W. Graver

CLST 10.13 New Testament. Studies the collection of Christian texts now called the "New Testament" for the insights they provide into the complex cultural interactions in the first-century Mediterranean world. Three primary texts, the Gospel of Mark, Paul's letter to the Colossians, and Paul's letter to James, will be examined in light of their original Jewish context and their embeddedness in Greek thought and Roman socio-political structures. This small-enrollment class is taught conjointly with GRK 29, but with assignments and assessment appropriate for students reading entirely in English. TMV, W. Whaley

CLST 10.16 Gender and Sexuality in the Ancient Greek World. How did the ancient Greeks think about sex, gender, and sexuality? Which behaviors and relationships were considered socially acceptable, and why? And what does it mean to seek out ancient Greek models for contemporary (queer) identities? This course examines the construction of gender and sexuality in ancient Greece, as well as its modern reception, through the study of written texts, material culture, and feminist and queer theory. Schultz.

CLST 12.02 Greek and Roman Engineering and Technology. An introduction to the most important machines and processes of Greek and Roman technology. Emphasis on the practical implications and applications of ancient technologies and engineering. Reading will be based on a texbook, Greek and Roman sources in translation, and selected secondary sources. TAS, W. Kramer-Hajos.

CLST 12.05/ HUM 3.09 Stolen Histories  Students learn to think through contemporary debates over the ownership and treatment of cultural artifacts and human remains by examining specific areas of ethical and legal conflict in the humanities. From the Parthenon of Athens to the priceless manuscripts of Timbuktu, from Sappho's lyric poetry to the "terrible music" of the Middle Passage, from Emily Dickinson's legacy to looted Native American graves, we trace histories of contested heritage and ponder their meaning for modern communities. Open to all classes without prerequisites.  ART, INT; CI. Hruby and Schultz.

CLST 19 Roman Britain. This seminar explores the history of Roman Britain, from the pre-Roman Iron Age cultures through the first Roman contact (55-54 BCE), the development of a Roman presence, up to the official Roman withdrawal by imperial decision in 410 CE. We survey the kinds of evidence to write the history: Greek and Roman literary records; British and Roman coinage; inscriptions on stone and wood; archaeological material, including cult installations, military camps, houses, walls. Roman Britain was both an administrative region of the Roman Empire and a frontier, a place where different peoples/cultures interacted and where cultural as well as physical boundaries were crossed. Whereas the province of Britain illustrates the typical structures of Roman society and culture, its frontier society problematizes questions of lived experience and cultural hybridity, how we study the heterogeneous experience of status, gender, ethnicity of various peoples in antiquity.SOC, CI. Stewart

CLST 29/30/31 Off-Campus Study Program in Greece. Christesen

GRK 1.02/3.02  Intensive Greek    A double course (two time slots) covering both GRK 1 and GRK 3 in a single term. Introduces all the basics of grammar and syntax and provides a gradual introduction to the reading of continuous texts. Tell

GRK 3   Intermediate Greek  Continued study of Greek grammar and syntax and an introduction to reading in prose authors. Satisfies the College language requirement. Schultz

GRK 29 New Testament. A brief introduction to the language, vocabulary, and idiom of New Testament Greek, followed by readings in the Gospels and the Epistles of St. Paul.  TMV, W. Whaley

LAT 2   Latin 2  Continues the study of the Latin language, with a look at the history and culture of Roman Britain and the city of Rome in the first century AD. Includes an introduction to Roman funerary inscriptions, curse tablets, and coins. Kramer-Hajos, Gaki

LAT 3   Latin 3  Completes the introduction to Latin grammar and syntax, then moves into unadapted selections from Pliny, Catullus, Ovid, and other Roman authors. Lynn, Walker, Gaki

LAT 10.04 Latin Manuscripts and Paleography An introduction to paleography, from the scripts of Late Antiquity to the Humanist scripts of the Renaissance. Students learn to transcribe and translate Latin manuscripts and to understand them both as transmitters of texts and as material objects that tell their own stories. Course flyer, Lynn

LAT 35 Satire and Humor. Basically a humorous monologue on contemporary topics, verse satire is the one kind of writing the Romans claimed as entirely their own. The class will read some of the best-known examples by Horace and Juvenal and may also explore other examples of Roman humor: epigrams by Catullus or Martial, Seneca's Pumpkinification, Petronius's Satyricon.  LIT, W. Foxley