GLAM

This class surveys the surviving plays of Aristophanes, Menander, Plautus, and Terence. For Old Comedy, the class will discuss its structural features (such as the chorus and the parabasis), and look at the way that Aristophanes engages with the politics of his day as well as the role of women in Athens. Students learn the canonical definitions of Old, Middle, and New comedy, and see the revolution of style and taste that differentiates Menander from Aristophanes. The class looks at the ways in which comedy transgresses social norms and the role of the carnivalesque in ancient culture.

This course explores ancient Greek and Roman tragedy. Students begin by examining the social, political, and physical contexts in which dramas were performed. Students then read and discuss select plays by the three great surviving dramatists of fifth-century BCE Athens (Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides) and the one great surviving dramatist of Imperial Rome (Seneca the younger).

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.

How did a small farming village on the banks of the Tiber River become mistress of an empire stretching from Britain to Egypt? This course explores the political institutions, social structures, and cultural attitudes that enabled Rome to become the world's only superpower at the time. One theme of the course is how that rise to power affected the lives of the Romans and how the Romans affected the lives of all those they encountered.

This course makes an odyssey through Greek political, social, cultural, and economic history from the Bronze Age (c. 1200 BCE) to the death of Alexander the Great (323 BCE). The emphasis is less on the chronicle of events than on understanding the changing nature of Greek society during this period. Major topics to be explored include the development of the city-state as a political unit; notions of equality in ancient Greece; and the simultaneous flourishing of the arts and building of an empire at Athens under Pericles.

This course centers on an intensive two-week sojourn in the Eternal City, Rome. Students use the urban topography, ancient ruins, modern reconstructions, and museums to immerse themselves in the lived experience of the city of Rome. Students learn architectural building techniques and systems of dating, problems in identifying surviving buildings, the iconography of Roman political sculpture, and issues of Roman copying and reuse of original Greek art.

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.

This course explores myths and legends from the ancient Mediterranean and the light these narratives cast on ancient conceptions of the human, the divine, nature, and society. The course focuses on how ancient myths manifest in ancient epic, drama, art, and religious ritual. The course also takes note of the afterlives of myths in the Roman, medieval, Renaissance, and modern worlds and examines some modern theoretical perspectives on myth in general and Greek myth in particular.

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 this .25 unit discussion-based class, students have the opportunity to engage with current topics in the field of ancient Mediterranean studies. Conversations may include developing familiarity with the range of sub-specialties within the field, understanding issues confronting scholars in the field, or discussing the appearance of the ancient world in popular media such as movies or television. Students also have the opportunity to share their own research, to learn about faculty research, and engage in conversation about recent trends in research.