{"id":8659,"date":"2021-06-08T09:22:24","date_gmt":"2021-06-08T13:22:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/classics\/?p=8659"},"modified":"2021-06-08T09:24:12","modified_gmt":"2021-06-08T13:24:12","slug":"recap-26th-barsc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/classics\/2021\/06\/08\/recap-26th-barsc\/","title":{"rendered":"Recap: 26th Annual Boston Area Roman Studies Conference"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

The 26th<\/sup> annual meeting of the Boston Area Roman Studies Conference was held on Friday, April 23, 2021 over zoom and featured presentations from:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Diana Spencer (Professor and Dean of Liberal Arts and Natural Sciences, University of Birmingham), \u2018Strategies of Quotation in Varro\u2019s De Lingua Latina\u2019<\/li>\n
  2. Hannah \u010cul\u00edk-Baird (Assistant Professor, Boston University), \u2018Cicero on Fiction\u2019<\/li>\n
  3. Katharina Volk (Professor, Columbia University), \u2018Necromancers in the Senate\u2019<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The event had 67 attendees from the US, UK, and Canada. Attendees included faculty, from institutions such as MIT, Princeton, and Brown; graduate and undergraduate students from BU; and high school teachers both local and throughout the United States.<\/p>\n

    The first speaker, Professor Diana Spencer, illuminated the literary and ideological complexity of a text that has typically been dismissed as a merely practical handbook of Latin etymologies, the De Lingua Latina<\/em> (\u2018On the Latin Language\u2019) by Varro, written in the mid first century BCE. \u2018The etymologist\u2019, she remarked, \u2018must give space to prior voices\u2019. In the choice of whom or what to include as a linguistic authority, she argued, the practice of etymology \u2018is always bumping up against history\u2019s tender spots.\u2019<\/p>\n

    \u2018Fiction\u2019 is often thought to be an anachronistic category when dealing with classical literature and rhetoric, but the second speaker, Professor Hannah \u010cul\u00edk-Baird, argued for its usefulness in analysis of the ancient orator and philosopher Cicero. Cicero, she argued, noted a particular distance between \u2018reality and human narrativity\u2019, but also invoked fiction examples and anecdotes as a \u2018speculative, generative, literary device\u2019.<\/p>\n

    A question after Professor \u010cul\u00edk-Baird\u2019s talk asked provocatively about whether there were culturally specific ways in which ancient Romans conceptualized the \u2018imagination\u2019, and also whether the word \u2018fiction\u2019 (derived from the Latin verb that means \u2018to mold\u2019 or \u2018to shape\u2019) preserves traces of a more \u2018hands-on\u2019, materialist conception of the imagination in ancient Rome.<\/p>\n

    Professor Katharina Volk, the third speaker, gave an engaging account of the first-century BCE Roman senator, Publius Nigidius Figulus, who was famous in his own time both for writing about magic and astrology, and for performing spectacular acts of sorcery, hypnosis, and divination himself. Volk reconstructed the history of this once-dazzling figure, and used his case to challenge the scholarly generalization that the praise of Reason and Order was the primary drive of first-century Roman intellectual culture.<\/p>\n

    We thank the Boston University Center for the Humanities for their generous financial support of the conference. See you all next year!<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The 26th annual meeting of the Boston Area Roman Studies Conference was held on Friday, April 23, 2021 over zoom and featured presentations from: Diana Spencer (Professor and Dean of Liberal Arts and Natural Sciences, University of Birmingham), \u2018Strategies of Quotation in Varro\u2019s De Lingua Latina\u2019 Hannah \u010cul\u00edk-Baird (Assistant Professor, Boston University), \u2018Cicero on Fiction\u2019 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16797,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[17148],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/classics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8659"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/classics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/classics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/classics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16797"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/classics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8659"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/classics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8659\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8664,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/classics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8659\/revisions\/8664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/classics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/classics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/classics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}