ETHNICITY, RACE, &POWER IN ANCT MEDITERR

ETHNCTY,RACE&POWR:ANC MED

Concepts of ethnicity and race – deeply complex and often fraught – are catalyzing forces in modern society. This seminar explores the changing definitions and resonances of these categories in ancient contexts. Course readings will cover a variety of societies but return repeatedly to Egypt and Nubia as a touchstone. Over the course of the semester, we will explore how Nubians and Egyptians viewed one another as well as how both Egyptians and Nubians experienced and were experienced by immigrants, colonizers, and travelers. Throughout the ancient Mediterranean, as we’ll see, self-definitions and cultural boundaries shifted radically according to changing power dynamics both within groups and between them.

 

In seminar discussions, we’ll pose the following questions: How and when did groups who saw themselves as distinct from one another cooperate and intermarry? Define themselves in opposition to other groups or actively blur boundaries? Mobilize concepts of ethnicity or race to justify oppression? Engage in competition or resistance? Where, we will ask, did societies fracture and/or integrate? And what role did bicultural individuals play in cultural conversations and mediations? We will also seek to understand how our conceptions of ethnicity and race in the past are influenced not only by the biases of the present but by the methodologies we employ. In our discussions and investigations this semester we will learn a great deal about Northeast Africa in antiquity – but, so too, about ethnicity, concepts of race, and power throughout the ancient Mediterranean.

 

 

• R 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Ellen Morris
  CULPA: 10 Info
• 4 points

Mapping the Ancient Novel: Affordances,

This seminar explores the affordances and precarities of a variety of ancient landscapes and urban centers. So too it delves into the predilections of their inhabitants. At some point in the late first or second centuries CE, when the Eastern Mediterranean was under the authority of the Roman Empire, Greek writers and readers turned to escapist literature in which incredibly beautiful couples (predominantly heterosexual but also homosexual) met, fell and love, suffered setbacks, and ultimately…
no spoilers here
. While suffering the travails that separated them, they were often transported (by bandits, pirates, slave traders, armies, etc.) all across the Eastern Mediterranean. Over the semester, we will map these movements using the open-source geographical information system QGIS and discuss the choices that authors (and their characters) made, the cultural perceptions of settlements and their inhabitants, and the various affordances of different geographic regions (where bandits lurk, for example). We will also read and discuss material that will help us ascertain the degrees of fantasy vs. plausibility, not only in the mechanics of movement but in the religious and social practice of the protagonists.

• T 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Ellen Morris
  CULPA: 10 Info
• 4 points

ARISTOTLE'S POETICS AND GREEK POETRY

ARISTOTLE POETICS & GRK P

This course is designed as an upper-level seminar centered on a central text in the ancient and modern literary canon. The course does not require more than a passing familiarity with the
Poetics
or with Greek tragedy nor knowledge of Greek. In addition to reading and comparing various translations of the
Poetics
, we will look at scenes from Sophocles'
Oedipus Tyrannos
and Euripides'
Iphigeneia in Taurus
, both of which were Aristotle's favorite exemplary tragedies, though for quite different reasons.

• W 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Nancy Worman
  CULPA: 23 Wikipedia Info
• 3 points