Calling all Princeton sophomores to the Classics Department's annual open house! Join faculty and current majors for merriment, refreshments, and conversation on all the department has to offer. Pizza will be served!

This talk offers a preview of my forthcoming book, which explores how Vietnamese writers from the French colonization era to contemporary times have engaged with the Greco-Roman classical tradition for different liberatory purposes. I will introduce my overarching theoretical framework, “critical classicality,” a decolonial approach that…

We are living, sadly, in an age of the big political lie: leaders avowing untruths so stark and incredible that their purpose is not so much to mislead as to assert control. In an emerging autocracy, the big lie serves to remind the populace that obedience is more important than truth. Among the lies promulgated by the emperor Augustus as he…

What do simple clay vessels reveal about the rise of one of history’s greatest cities? This talk explores the social and economic changes that transformed Rome and Latium between the 8th and 6th centuries BCE, focusing on the people behind the pottery. From everyday cooking pots to refined tableware, these ceramics hold clues about the lives of…

Already in his own lifetime, Euripides was known for pushing the boundaries of what a tragedy could or should be. While recent scholarship has tended to focus on discrete areas of experimentation, especially Euripides’ play with music and genre, this paper proposes the model of proliferation as a more holistic way of approaching his most…

Textile production was a vital part of classical Greek economies, predominantly managed and carried out by women. Recent scholarship, shaped by New Institutional Economics, suggests a division of labor where men wove luxury textiles in workshops for the market, while women created basic textiles at home for domestic use. However, this view,…

How did Romans communicate along the expanding edges of empire—on the verbal, physical, and visual levels—when Latin is unavailable? This illustrated presentation treats four different periods and locations: 1) interactions between Etruscan and Roman culture in the early to middle Republic; 2) modes of contact during the late Republic and early…

Pompeii has long occupied a privileged place in modern imaginings of the Roman past. Beyond the city’s well-known monuments, however, lies a well of data that has barely begun to be tapped. This talk will introduce the research program of Tulane University’s Pompeii I.14 Project, an interdisciplinary excavation focusing on one large building…