A dark screen transforms into a cosmic expanse as a meteoric sculpture scrolls into view. The 3D image of the sculpture is replaced with words from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1969 film, Medea: “A vessel full of knowledge that is not mine.” The words seem like a perfect commentary on the video-art, which a roomful of Princeton students watch, hushed. They also speak to the pedagogical method used by Classics Professor Brooke Holmes to teach Euripides’s Medea by introducing students to different modern adaptations.
Princeton Classics professors Johannes Haubold and Barbara Graziosi teamed up with a group of international scholars and graduate students to write a paper on the exegetical scholia to Homer's Iliad. Their paper argues that reading textual criticism and interpretive scholarship together can shed new light on the text itself.
Cambridge University Press Releases Empire and Religion in the Roman World, Edited by Princeton Classics professor Harriet Flower.
Princeton Classics professor Marc Domingo Gygax will join Oxford's Corpus Christi college as a visiting research fellow this year.
Ge’ez, or Classical Ethiopic, is one of the ancient world’s major literary languages, with two millennia of history in the Horn of Africa and Arabia. The language appears in many ancient inscriptions and in Jewish and Christian writings, even shaping the language of the Qur’an and early Muslim religious texts. It continues to live on today as the liturgical language of the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox churches.
The Classics department welcomes our newest faculty member, Emily Greenwood, who will join Princeton as a Professor in both Classics and the University Center for Human Values. Her work spans Greek literature and language, reception studies, intellectual history, postcolonial studies and Black studies. Her vast expertise on the Classical world and its continuing influences today make her an important addition to the department.
Is strategic rationality a modern way of thinking? Not according to Josiah Ober, Mitsotakis Professor of Political Science and Classics at Stanford University, and formerly a professor at Princeton University.
The London Hellenic book Prize 2020 has been awarded to Dr Rosa Andújar’s (KCL) edition of The Greek Trilogy of Luis Alfaro: Electricidad; Oedipus El Rey; Mojada (Bloomsbury/Methuen Drama) -- Mexican-American playwright Luis Alfaro's highly original cultural and linguistic adaptations of Sophocles’ Electra and Oedipus Rex and Euripides’ Medea to the life of urban/ immigrant Latinx communities in Los Angeles.
Taishi Nakase, an operations research and financial engineering concentrator has been selected as valedictorian of Princeton’s Class of 2021. Lucy Wang, a chemistry concentrator pursuing a certificate in Classics with a focus on Ancient Roman language and culture, was named salutatorian.
What type of effort goes into writing about Roman historian and politician Sallust?
The work of extruding an argument from [my] prose, Feldherr posits, “...is like eating stinky cheese through a straw.” An interesting image to be sure. If this piques your curiosity regarding the method the writer and Princeton University professor uses to answer profound questions about Sallust’s motives and integrity in his writings pick up a copy of “After the Past, Sallust on History and Writing History” available June 2021.
Marc Domingo Gygax is Director of the Program in the Ancient World and Professor of Classics. His new book “Benefactors and the Polis: The Public Gift in the Greek Cities from the Homeric World to Late Antiquity” was co-edited by Arjan Zuiderhoek (Universiteit Gent) and published by Cambridge University Press in December 2020. In this interview, Professor Gygax talks about his research into public gifts in ancient Greek cities.
Program in the Ancient World will be hosting the Magie Lecture featuring Josiah Ober.
Thucydides on asymmetrical relations between states: Rationality and its limits.
Thursday, April 22, 2021
4:30 PM - 6:00 PM
Dido, Queen of Carthage, is one of the best-known women of the ancient Mediterranean. And yet we seem to know little about what the Carthaginians themselves thought of her. In the 2021 Prentice lecture, ‘Wandering Dido: Reclaiming a Carthaginian Queen,’ Josephine Quinn, Professor of Ancient History at the University of Oxford, sought to explore this question in a wide-ranging investigation of the sources and stories behind the Dido myth.
Teaching Awards honor those graduate students who have made a significant and exceptional contribution to undergraduate teaching. The selection committee for the awards consists of the deans in Academic Affairs from my office as well as senior staff from the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning.
The Department of Classics is overjoyed with Elliot's accomplishment.
The Department of Classics has been much in the news lately – and, just to be blunt about it, the content has been critical. Some articles focus on individual members of our department; others criticize classics as a field. It is not my intention here to rehearse all the arguments and discussions that have raged in the media over the past few months, except to say that they have, by and large, been backward-looking in orientation, whether in criticizing the behavior of individual classicists or the shortcomings of the field at large.
Although the Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted both the “residential” and the “fellowship” aspects of “residential fellowships,” Christopher van den Berg has used residential fellowships from the American Academy in Rome and the ACLS (the Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars) to conduct groundbreaking research on Roman literary criticism and history.
Yelena Baraz teamed up last fall with Jhumpa Lahiri to teach a class called “Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities: Ancient Plots, Modern Twists". Offered through the Humanities Council, the seminar examined how today’s writers reimagine classical narratives so as to illuminate contemporary issues.
Dan-el Padilla Peralta thinks classicists should knock ancient Greece and Rome off their pedestal — even if that means destroying their discipline.
The Society for Classical Studies is delighted to announce that the TAPA Editor Search Committee has selected Joshua Billings and Irene Peirano Garrison as the new co-editors of TAPA. This is the first time in its history that TAPA will be led by two co-editors. Professors Billings and Peirano Garrison will cover TAPA volumes 152-155 (2022-2025). Volume 153 will include a themed issue, as previously announced, on race, racism and Classics, edited by Professors Sasha-Mae Eccleston and Patrice Rankine.
‘Der “Oxforder Boethius”. Studie und lateinisch-deutsche Edition’ is published by Erich Schmidt Verlag, Berlin, as part of the series ‘Texte des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit’ (TMA, no. 58). The book, a co-production between a medieval Latinist and a medieval Germanist, focuses on the reception of Boethius's Consolatio philosophiae (ca. 524) in the later Middle Ages. One of the most influential late-antique texts, the Consolation was extremely widespread in the Middle Ages. The rendering of the text into vernacular languages commences almost as early as the glossing and commenting of it.
On a momentous day in which much of the country was watching the polls, the Princeton community was also fixated by another extraordinary event: the Fagles lecture. In the third iteration of the recently-established lecture for Classics in the Contemporary Arts, Tony award-winning director and MacArthur fellow Mary Alice Zimmerman took students and faculty through her extraordinary career in direction and adaptation as part of a talk called ‘Bodies I Have in Mind’.
On the evening of Tuesday, November 3rd, Tony-award winning director and MacArthur fellow Mary Alice Zimmerman, delivered third in the recently inaugurated series of Fagles Lectures for Classics in the Contemporary Arts, entitled “Bodies I have in Mind: Embodying Myth on Stage”. To view a full recording of the event click here.
Yelena Baraz is the Kennedy Foundation Professor of Latin Language and Literature, Professor of Classics, and Behrman Professor in the Humanities Council. Her latest book “Reading Roman Pride” is published by Oxford University Press. Here, the Humanities Council interviews her about the book.
What do a stand-up comedian, a museum curator, an essayist, a public engagement manager, an online publisher, a journalist, an IT consultant, and a high school teacher have in common? After studying Classics at university, they are channeling their degrees into work outside academia. Professor Barbara Graziosi and graduate student Jermaine Bryant interviewed these Classicists to produce videos for 'Beyond the Academy,' a RapidResponse MagicProject from the Princeton University Humanities Council.
On Tuesday, October 20th, the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students hosted “Documenting Privilege” a FOCUS Speaker Series event featuring Dan-el Padilla Peralta ’06, associate professor of classics at Princeton University, and Anthony Jack, assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Dr. Padilla Peralta’s bestselling memoir, Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League(link is external) was released in 2016. Dr. Jack’s book, The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students (link is external) was named one of NPR’s Favorite Books of 2019. Undergraduate attendees were provided with a free copy of either of the panelists’ books, purchased locally from Source of Knowledge, an independent, Black-owned bookstore in Newark, New Jersey.
Fall 2021
The department's annual newsletter is now available online and paper copies have been mailed.
Inside you can find updates from faculty and students, an article by alumna Erynn Kim '17, a fascinating interview with Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow Erika Valdivieso, Clem Brown's '21, winemaking research project and so much more!