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. Uden (uden@bu.edu) or Senior Program Coordinator Joe Knapik (classics@bu.edu).

Presenters for 2024-2025 include:

Professor Anthony Corbeill (University of Virginia)
Monday, March 24, 2025. 5:30-7:00pm
CAS B18, 725 Commonwealth Ave
Title: Communicating on Rome’s Edges: Tongues, Gestures, and Art

Description: How did Romans communicate along the expanding edges of empire-on the verbal, physical and visual levels-when Latin was unavailable? The lecture will treat four different periods and locations;

Interactions between Etruscan and Roman culture in the early to middle Republic
Modes of contact during the late Republic and early empires, in particular between Julius Caesar and the Gauls
Monumental inscriptions from the imperial period erected in the eastern reaches out of the empire
Gestural communication and artistic exchange during late antiquity that arises from commercial activity beyond the eastern most portions of Rome’s expanse

Professor Victoria Wohl (University of Toronto)
Tuesday, November 12, 2024. 5:30-7:30pm
CAS 313, 725 Commonwealth Ave
Title: Of Pigs and The Proper: Philosophy and The Other in Plutarch’s Gryllus

Description: Plutarch’s Gryllus (“Grunter”) stages a dialogue between Odysseus and one of his men who was turned into a pig by Circe about whether animals are more virtuous than humans. This humorous treatise raises serious questions about the place of the other in philosophy: must philosophy exclude the other in order to constitute the proper domain of reason (logos) or does it require the other for its practice of intellectual inquiry (dialogos)? This paper examines how the treatise thinks through these questions and the implications for Plutarch’s philosophy.

Professor Mark Thatcher (Boston College)
Monday, October 21, 2024. 5:00-7:30pm
CAS 224, 725 Commonwealth Ave
Title: When the Athenians Came: Rethinking the Sicilian Expedition

Description: The Sicilian Expedition, one of the most famous events in Greek history, has usually been understood from an Athenian perspective, as a disaster of epic proportions. What if we flipped the script and instead foregrounded Sicilian perspectives? Drawing on a wider range of sources and digging deeper into the Sicilian background and context of this period can help us rethink the expedition’s origins and its place in history.

Professor Lauren Donovan Ginsberg (Duke University)
Tuesday, October 1, 2024. 5:00-7:30pm
CAS 313, 725 Commonwealth Ave
Title: Lament for Oechalia: Pastoral’s Imperialist Complicity in the Hercules Oetaeus

Description: The anonymous imperial tragedy, Hercules Oetaeus, opens with a bombastic Hercules asserting his right to divinity because of his imperial project of monster killing and world pacification. But directly next comes an unprecedented choral ode by the women who recently experienced this peace-making: the women of Oechalia. As these women look for a final time at their wasted homeland, they sing an angry lament about their country’s future. This lament, I argue, is markedly engaged with the Roman pastoral mode and, through this engagement, presents the pastoral genre as complicit in Hercules’ imperialist violence.

Presenters for 2023-2024 include:

Professor Stephen Hinds (University of Washington)
Friday, March 1, 2024. 5:00-6:30pm
CAS B36, 725 Commonwealth Ave
Title: Latin poetry across languages: micro-negotiating classical tradition, with Joachim Du Bellay and John Milton

Description: A try-out of material from my soon-to-be-completed Latin Poetry across Languages: Adventures in Allusion, Translation and Classical Tradition (working title), framed with remarks on the book’s era-straddling plan. I will lead off with some observations about the poetic interaction of Latin and Greek in the ancient Roman world (from Part I of my book), focusing on paradoxical elements in that much-studied relationship. Then, moving forward in time, I will sample two early modern case studies from Part II, ‘Readings between Latin and vernacular’: (a) ‘Du Bellay in Rome, between Latin and French’ (drawing on that poet’s French Antiquitez de Rome and his Latin elegy Romae descriptio, both from the 1550s), and (b), more briefly, ‘Reverse-engineering Milton’ (in which, against the background of Milton’s 1645 double book of Poems English and Latin, I conjure up a virtual Latin ‘twin’ for the great epic which Milton did not write in Latin, Paradise Lost. Poetic conversations throughout will be driven by close engagement across space and time with (especially) Horace, Ovid and Virgil.

Professor Victoria Pagan (University of Florida)
Thursday, October 5, 2023. 5:00-6:30pm
STH B19, 745 Commonwealth Ave
Title: Sallust and the Open Society

Description: When read through the lens of Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies, Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae becomes a unified meditation on the nature of change, the conditions of leadership, and ultimately the difference between tyranny and democracy. But of course, it is also the prototype of conspiracy narratives in Roman literature, and Popper’s formulation of the “conspiracy theory of society” sheds light on both the form and the content of Sallust’s monograph.

Professor Katherine Lu Hsu (College of the Holy Cross)
Monday, October 30, 2023. 4:45-6:15pm
CAS B36, 725 Commonwealth Ave.
Title: Meet Me Outside: Mythological Courage and Cowardice Beyond the Hero

Description: This talk will examine the representation of courage and cowardice beyond the paradigmatic hero in early Greek myth. We will look at examples of courage on the battlefield among foreigners and women, and consider why non-elites seem to be excluded from the kleos economy. This study reveals some of the “hard lines” that limit the mythological imagination, suggesting an enduring anxiety about internal stasis.

Professor Niek Janssen (Amherst College)
Wednesday, November 15, 2023. 4:45-6:15pm
CAS B18, 725 Commonwealth Ave.
Title: Making Fit: Parody and Decorum in Greco-Roman Literature

Description: The concepts of decorum and to prepon pervade Greco-Roman ethical and aesthetic thought. Yet ancient theorists from Plato to Dionysius, Cicero, Horace, and Quintilian struggle to articulate what “appropriateness” is and how it is grounded. By confronting these theorists with parodic and comedic texts, which stand in a double, transgressive-yet-conservative relationship to decorum, I argue that this inarticulability is a feature, not a bug, of the concept. Texts like Hegemon’s Parodies, Plautus’ Asinaria, and the Pseudo-Virgilian Culex reveal the instability of decorum as a basis for normative thought–as a principle for aesthetic judgment and social inclusion/exclusion.

Presenters for 2022-2023 include:

Jenny Clay (University of Virginia)
Tuesday, April 11, 2023. 5:30-7:00pm
CAS 132, 725 Commonwealth Ave.
Topic: Last Tango in Ogygia: Gods and Men in Odyssey 5

Laurie Hutcheson (Boston University)
Monday, January 30, 20223. 3:30-5:30pm
CAS 533B, 725 Commonwealth Ave.
Topic: Penelope’s {A}typical Thinking

Abstract: Penelope’s thought process—in contrast to male heroes’–has been described in turn as intuitive, irrational, inaccessible, and unresolved. The Odyssey represents Penelope deliberating 4 times, more than any other character except Odysseus. I argue that the typical scene of deliberation in the Odyssey is tightly coordinated and differs from the Iliadic model, and that Penelope’s deliberations need to be read in light of this. In particular, Penelope’s choice in book 19 resonates both within this context of Odyssean deliberation and within the Iliadic context of heroic soliloquys; she both aligns with and inverts typical heroic patterns. While she makes decisions amid deep instability, Penelope’s thoughts are articulated clearly and legibly in the reverberative frame of Homeric representations of thought.

Timothy Clark (Boston University)
Thursday, October 6, 2022. 5:30 – 7:00pm
JSC 201, 147 Bay State Rd.
Topic: From Roman Geopolitics to American Law: How Classics Can Illuminate Historical Experiences and Structures of Racism and Othering

Abstract: In recent years, events at home and abroad have demonstrated the urgent need to highlight and uproot structures of racism and inequality that dominate American life. Academic complicity in these structures has also come under increased scrutiny. Scholars within Classics and ancient history have used new methodologies to expand our views of ancient societies and render the ancient world relevant to the 21^st century.

In support of these efforts, Professor Timothy Clark will show in this lecture how comparing the ancient and modern worlds sheds new light on the conceptual frameworks that underpin racism and othering. Professor Clark will show how Roman officials under the emperor Nero and the American legal system in the 21^st century situated eastern “others” in conceptual and legal positions where their exact status was left ambiguous. He will explain why this form of Orientalism persists and how it personally impacted ancient eastern nobles and modern Iranian-Americans alike. This lecture will show the dangerous consequences that result when the categories we create for different ethnic and racial groups are taken for granted.

Kristina Chew (Rutgers University)
Tuesday, October 18, 2022. 5:00 – 6:30pm.
STH B23, 745 Commonwealth Avenue.
Topic: Translating Catullus and Catullus Translating

Presenters for 2021-2022 include:

Patrick Finglass (University of Bristol)
Friday, March 18, 2022. 4:30-6:15pm
CAS B18, 685-725 Commonwealth Ave.
Topic: Euripides’ Danaë and Dictys: a new papyrus

Abstract: P.Oxy. 5283, originally from a second-century papyrus roll, contains ancient prose summaries (‘hypotheses’) of five tragedies by the classical Greek dramatist Euripides, including of two lost plays depicting the hero Perseus, Danaë and Dictys, previously known only from meagre fragments. Since its publication in 2017, however, it has been overlooked by scholarship. This paper examines the light which the papyrus sheds on Danaë and Dictys, whose narratives, centred around ultimately successful female resistance to abusive male tyrants, speak as powerfully to us today as they did to their original ancient audiences. It proceeds to investigate Euripides’ tragic trilogy of 431 BC, which ended with Dictys and began with what today is probably Euripides’ most famous play, Medea, whose brilliance now stands in sharper focus given our significantly improved understanding of the context in which it originally appeared. Building on this analysis, the paper further considers what impact this papyrus has on our picture of the tragic trilogy more generally, demonstrating the range of approaches taken by tragic poets to this inherited literary form. Finally, it ponders the purposes which such a document served in the Roman empire, and why readers in the second century AD should have wanted a summary of plays written more than half a millennium before.

Sarah Spence (University of Georgia)
Tuesday, February 8, 2022, 4:30-6:15pm
CAS 116, 685-725 Commonwealth Ave.
Topic: “Reading Against the Grain: The Cultural Poetics of Roman Sicily”

Caitlin Gillespie (Brandeis University)
Monday, November 8, 2021, 4:30-6:15pm
CAS B18, 685-725 Commonwealth Ave.
Topic: “The Mind, Once Manly, Now Effeminate: Gender and the Failure of Language in Sallust”

Kendra Eshleman (Boston College)
Monday, October 18, 2021, 4:30-6:15pm
CAS B18, 685-725 Commonwealth Ave.
Topic: “Unlettered in Paradise: Non-Readers in Early Christian Reading Culture”

Presenters for 2020-2021 include:

Presenters for 2019-2020 include:

Presenters for 2018-2019 include:

Presenters for 2017-2018 include:

Dee Clayman (The City University of New York)
Monday, April 30, 4pm-6pm
School of Theology Rm. 409
“Astral Politics: Royal Catasterisms in Callimachus and Aratus”

Marco Formisano (Ghent University)
Monday, April 9, 4pm-6pm
School of Theology Rm. 409
“Seeing Double: The Contemporary and the Immemorial in Claudian and Colluthus”

Roberta Stewart (Dartmouth College)
Monday, March 12, 4pm-6pm
School of Theology Rm. 409
“Seeing Caesar’s Symbols: Religious Iconography on Caesar’s Civil War Coins”

Dr. Emily Hauser (Society of Fellows, Harvard University)
Monday, February 26, 4pm-6pm
School of Theology Rm. 409
“Women’s Myths, Women’s Voices: Recovering the Women of Greek Myth in Contemporary Fiction”

Gareth Williams (Columbia University)
Monday, November 13, 4pm-6pm
School of Theology Rm. 625
“Eschatology in Seneca: The Senses of an Ending”
What happens to us in death? Seneca, like many philosophical thinkers before him, reflected hard on what awaits us after we depart, and this talk seeks to illuminate some of the creative ways in which he broaches this time-honored topic.
Sponsored by the Boston University Center for the Humanities, the Study Group on Myth and Religion in the Ancient World, and the Boston University Department of Classical Studies.

Zacharoula Petraki (University of Crete)
Wednesday, November 8, 4pm-6pm
School of Theology Rm. 409
“The Heroization of Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo and of Oedipus in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus.”
Sponsored by the Boston University Center for the Humanities, the Study Group on Myth and Religion in the Ancient World, and the Boston University Department of Classical Studies.

Daniel Selden (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Friday, November 3, *4pm-6pm
School of Theology Rm. 625
“Guardians of Chaos: The Coptic Alexander Romance”
Sponsored by the Boston University Center for the Humanities, the Study Group on Myth and Religion in the Ancient World, the Boston University Department of Classical Studies, and the Boston University Department of World Languages and Literature.

Presenters for 2016-2017 include:

Presenters for 2015-2016 include:

Presenters for 2014-2015 include:

Professor Mary Yossi (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens).
Thursday, March 5
‘”Human Rights” and Greek Tragedy”‘
Also sponsored by the Onassis Foundation

Ilaria Ramelli (Sacred Heart Major Seminary/Erfurt University)
Monday, March 2
“The Role of Asceticism in the Rejection of Slavery and Social Injustice in Ancient Philosophy, Ancient Judaism, and Early Christianity”
Also sponsored by the Onassis Foundation
Summary: Were slavery and social injustice leading to dire poverty in antiquity and late antiquity only regarded as normal, “natural” (Aristotle), or at best something morally “indifferent” (the Stoics), or, in the Christian milieu, a sad but inevitable consequence of the Fall, or even an expression of God’s unquestionable will (Augustine)? The lecture will show that there were also definitive condemnations of slavery and social injustice as iniquitous and even impious, and that these came especially from ascetics. It will be argued that this depends on a link not only between asceticism and renunciation, but also between (philosophical) asceticism and justice.

Lynn Huber (Elon University, NC)
Monday, February 23
“Revealing and Rejecting Imperial Family Values: Revelation as Social Critique”
Summary: Sitting at the edge of the Christian canon the Book of Revelation has puzzled readers for centuries. Even early interpreters wondered whether it should be called a “revelation” given its otherworldly imagery and puzzling pronouncements. Understood within the tradition of Jewish apocalyptic writing and in relation to its first-century Roman context, Revelation can be understood as an “unveiling” of what John, the author, believes to be the corrupt, even evil, nature of Roman power. However, in calling his audience to resist the “whorish” appeal of Rome, John engages and even replicates the dominant social discourses of his day.

Athina Papachrysostomou (University of Patras)
December 8, 2014
“Comic Money: The Case of Hetairai and Fishmongers”

Alessandro Barchiesi (Stanford)
October 23, 2014
“The War for Italia in Vergil’s Aeneid”

New Approaches to Classics Lecture Series

Presenters for 2024-2025 include:

Presenters for 2023-2024 include:

Presenters for 2022-2023 include:

Presenters for 2021-2022 include:

Presenters for 2020-2021 include:

Presenters for 2019-2020 include:

Presenters for 2018-2019 include:

Presenters for 2017-2018 include:

Presenters for 2016-2017 include:

Presenters for 2015-2016 include:

Presenters for 2014-2015 include:

Presenters for 2013-2014 include:

Presenters for 2012-2013 include:

Presenters for 2011-2012 include:

Presenters for 2010-2011 include:

Presenters for 2009-2010 include:

Presenters for 2008-2009 include:

Presenters for 2007-2008 include:

Presenters for 2004-2005 include: