New Approaches to Classics Lecture Series

New Approaches to Classics (formerly Myth and Religion) is the departmental lecture series of the Boston University Department of Classical Studies. Typically there are two or three lectures in each semester by invited speakers from the US and abroad. Since 2022, the lecture series has been particularly focused on showcasing the work of junior scholars and scholars from diverse backgrounds; work that connects the ancient world to contemporary issues and concerns; and work that challenges the boundaries of what ‘Classics’ can and should mean today. Beginning in Spring 2023, one speaker per year is determined by the vote of the graduate students. All lectures are free and open for anyone to attend.

The New Approaches to Classics lecture series is generously funded by a grant from the Boston University Center for the Humanities.

For more information, contact Prof. Steven Smith (sds74@bu.edu) or Senior Program Coordinator Joe Knapik (classics@bu.edu).

Presenters for 2025-2026 include:

 

Professor Melissa Mueller (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Friday, October 3, 2025.  5:30-7:30pm
CAS B18, 725 Commonwealth Ave
Title: Democracy and the Earth in Aeschylus’ Suppliants

Description: In offering asylum to the Danaid chorus in Aeschylus’ Suppliants, the Argives exercise their public decision-making power, a cornerstone of democratic ideology. But democracy requires more than the will of the people. In this talk I explore both the form of this tragedy, with its extended parodos, and the autochthony myths that are reactivated around the Danaids’ appeal for protection, and I argue that the grant of metic status in Argos to the women speaks to the interdependence, vital to democracy both ancient and modern, between the land (earth as environment) and the polis. The Danaids’ presence in Argos, I suggest, not only reminds the male citizens of their earthly origins and democratic commitments, but also prompts the earth’s intervention, activating collective memories of the exile of their bovine ancestor, Io.

 

Professor Jared M. Hudson (Brandeis University)
Friday, November 7, 2025.  5:30-7:30pm
CAS B18, 725 Commonwealth Ave
Title: Pomponius Mela on The Periphery: Latin Geography and the Roman Empire

Description: Pomponius Mela’s first-century CE geography (De Chorographia) offers a unique portrait of what purports to be the entire world articulated in highly artistic rhetorical Latin prose. Once a central text in antiquity and beyond, this detailed geographical handbook has since become practically forgotten. Tracing some of the historical causes for this neglect, this paper examines some of the distinctive features of this fascinating and unclassifiable text, arguing that Pomponius Mela’s written geography represents an important cultural shift in unofficial Roman representations of the layout and knowability of global space.

 

Professor Olaoluwatoni A. Alimi (Princeton University)
Monday, December 8, 2025.  5:30-7:30pm
CAS B18, 725 Commonwealth Ave
Title: Augustine’s Varieties of Natural Slavery

Description: Augustine is typically interpreted as having denied that there are natural slaves. Against the common interpretation, I argue that Augustine affirmed three separate natural slavery theses (and rejected only one). Aspects of Augustine’s accounts of natural slavery were central to 17th-century English rationalizations for slavery. However, they also left open several lacunae that these pro-slavers turned to Aristotle to fill. The methods for filling these lacunae were in turn central to the legal codification of some modern notions of race, including three familiar features: first, that race is immutable; second, that race is inheritable; third, that blacks are deficient to whites.