Greek, Latin & Ancient Mediterranean Studies

This course provides a solid grounding in Greek and Latin roots and other word components used in English with the aim of facilitating comprehension of both technical and non-technical vocabulary, including the specialized vocabulary of particular technical and professional fields such as the biological sciences, medicine, and law. Students will learn the principles at play in word formation and develop the ability to quickly recognize and analyze vocabulary derived from ancient Greek and Latin. In the process, we will learn about the historical, cultural, and linguistic underpinnings of the etymological influence ancient Greek and Latin have exerted on the English language. No previous knowledge of Latin or ancient Greek is required.

This course centers on an intensive three-week academic tour of Greece where students use the sites, landscape, and, museums of Greece as the classroom from which they can make a holistic study of the Greece they had only previous experienced through texts. In other words, this course places ancient Greece and its texts in their real, physical context. In Greece, students spend about 10-12 hours each day on sites, in museums, and in active discussions, including a one-hour seminar discussion at the end of each day. During these three weeks, students engage with Greece ancient and modern as much as possible. During the spring semester, prior to the trip to Greece, students will meet one hour per week to start preparing for the trip. Such preparations will include sessions dedicated to learning fundamental information for the study of pre-historic, archaic, classical, and post-classical Greece, as well as necessary technical terminology and research tools for encountering sites and giving site reports. This course is open to all students, with preference given to students in Greek, Latin, and Ancient Mediterranean Studies courses.

This course introduces the epic genre in Greece and Rome. The course concentrates on a selection of ancient epic poems including Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Vergil’s Aeneid. Students consider each epic as an individual cultural and artistic product, but also how later epics draw upon and respond to earlier ones. The gradually more complex understanding of the epic genre built into the class allows students to investigate how the Greek and Roman epics combine cosmology and human narratives in order to explore the place of human beings in the universe; the relationship between gods and mortals; and the connection between moral, social, or historical order and cosmological order.

This course offers an introduction to the field of archaeology, providing an overview of its goals, theory, methods, and ethics. Students discuss specific archaeological sites from the ancient Mediterranean in their historical, social, anthropological, economic, religious, and architectural contexts. Attention is given to issues relevant to Mediterranean archaeology today, including the looting of ancient sites, issues of cultural property, and ethics in archaeology. Students have the opportunity to learn and practice basic archaeological techniques, as well as to reflect on the significance of these techniques for understanding other peoples. Students thus gain an appreciation of the complexities of present-day archaeological research and both the benefits and limitations of the role of archaeology in creating our images of the past.

This course examines sex, gender, and sexualities in ancient Greece and Rome. Building upon foundational readings in feminist and queer theory, this course examines critically both historical evidence for and representations of love, gender, sex, and sexuality in a wide range of ancient literary texts, as well as epigraphic, art historical, and archaeological sources. Through this combination of using both Greek and Roman primary sources and modern gender theory, this course aims to make sense of such topics as women’s lives, marriage, prostitution, sexual violence, medicine, pederasty, sex manuals, and non-normative or "Other"-bodied (e.g. trans*) individuals.