UW-Madison Classics Graduate Colloquium,
October 2-3, 2009
Call for papers: expired
The question of death has occupied the human imagination for millenia, and was just as pressing in antiquity as it is today. Whether it was celebrated by tragedians, disdained by philosophers, or defied by poets, death was the ultimate estrangement that came eventually to every individual. For all its apparent finality, death was also sometimes seen as less of an ending than a doorway, offering a sneak peek of coming attractions to the occasional enterprising hero or promising to the initiates of mystery cults a chance to escape the usual fate.
The goal of this colloquium is to investigate the many ancient conceptualizations of death and what might come (or not come) afterwards. Possible topics might include, but are not limited to:
* commemoration or memorialization of those who have died;
* the process of dying, i.e. last words, manners of death, testaments;
* imagining the underworld, whether as a place of reward, punishment, or forgetfulness.
Just as there was a broad range of ideas and responses to death and the underworld in antiquity, we welcome papers on the topic from any discipline (philology, material culture, history, philosophy, etc.) and any time period of the Greco-Roman world.
The keynote address will be delivered by Sarah Iles Johnston, Professor of Greek and Latin at the Ohio State University.
Contact: Questions about the colloquium should be directed to Alex Hall, or answers sought on our website http://gradclassics.rso.wisc.edu.
The Classics Department of the Johns Hopkins University, October 2 & 3, 2009, in Baltimore, Maryland.
Call for papers: expired
The purpose of this year's conference, Aere Perennius: Memory & Posterity in Antiquity, is to explore the themes of ancestors and commemoration in the ancient world. We seek to understand the ways in which descendants recognized their heritage and perpetuated its memory for future generations. Potential topics could range from an examination of visual representations, such as iconography and funerary monuments, to literary questions of legal inheritance and prosopography.
Some of the questions that may be considered include: How did the ancients honor their deceased and their past? What are the ways in which they established lineage, bequests, and birthrights? How does status, from freeborn to slave, affect the ways in which the ancients were remembered? How did people seek to link their heritage to illustrious figures from myth and history? Are there ways in which we can see the denial of heredity and of the past, such as the act of damnatio memoriae? How does our extant evidence, including numismatics, epitaphs, and other literary and archaeological sources, enhance our understanding of the ways in which the ancients commemorated their ancestors?
We are seeking papers that cover a range of literary and material culture topics from the Mediterranean world throughout antiquity. Submissions are welcomed from all areas of Classical Studies, including classics, art history, archaeology, philosophy, religious studies, and history.
Contact: Any inquiries regarding the conference may be directed to Jacquelyn Clements, or Shana O'Connell.
McMaster University
3 October 2009
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Emma Dench, Harvard University
Call for Papers: Expired
We encourage papers exploring both the acclimatization of foreign peoples to Roman
culture and the impact of those indigenous cultures on the Romans
themselves. A wide range of subjects are acceptable, including, but
not limited to, material culture, religion, linguistics, dress,
warfare, and political practices.
For information contact Patricia White.
New York University Graduate Conference,
November 7th, 2009
Call for papers: Expired
Keynote speaker: Jenny Strauss Clay
As a genre of ancient literature, didactic poetry holds a special place due to its claims of teaching. It opens a different register of speech, filled with imperatives and explanations, and offers a particular relationship between poet and audience�that of a teacher and student. Hesiod has his Perses, Lucretius his Memmius, and Ovid his adulteresses. But like all genres, didactic is tricky to define, appearing in a number of forms, hybrids, and varying degrees of seriousness throughout antiquity. The goal of this conference is to explore didactic in its various forms and manifestations, whether it be persuasive, instructive, or satirical. Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:
* Didactic as translation (Greek to Latin, prose to poetry)
* The influence or parallels of Near Eastern treatises and wisdom poetry on Greek & Roman didactic
* The role of rhetoric in didactic
* Post-antiquity reception of ancient didactic style
* The traffic between treatise and didactic poetry (e.g., Res Rustica and Georgics, Eudoxus and Aratus)
* Generic problems and issues of categorization of didactic in literature
* Ancient educational practices, especially as represented in material culture, that can inform didactic
Rutgers University, Camden, graduate conference April 9, 2010.
Call for papers: Deadline for submission is October 31, 2009.
Accepted presenters will receive email notification by January 10, 2010.
Send 250-word abstract for paper or poster presentation (specify which) and cover letter with name, current level of graduate study, affiliated university, and email address to m_modica@vfcc.edu. Include the words "conference abstract" in subject line, and include name on the cover letter only.
The graduate students of the Department of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University, Camden invite submissions for papers and poster presentations for their first formal graduate student conference on April 9, 2010. Graduate students from all disciplines who are engaged in research relating to children and childhood are encouraged to submit proposals.
The range of open topics within this field is as broad as the contexts of the experiences of children and childhood: war, health, rights, gender, poverty, wealth, policy, ethics, popular culture, globalization, school, family, home, sexuality, community, and representations in all modes of fiction. The field of Childhood Studies itself is open to interrogation.
Selected papers will be grouped into panels that may be based around discipline, theme, or perspective, but will demonstrate the common grounding of the papers in their mutual exploration of children and childhood studies.
Paper presentations should be limited to 20 minutes in length.
For further information, contact: Patrick Cox or Anandini Dar.
Visit the Department of Childhood Studies
The Graduate Humanities Forum of the University of Pennsylvania invites submissions for a one-day interdisciplinary conference on February 19th, 2010 at the Penn Humanities Forum in conjunction with its 2009-2010 topic: "Connections."
Call for papers: Send 250-word proposals for one of the panels along with a 1-page CV via email to Rachael Nichols by November 1, 2009. (Notification by December 1, 2009.)
For further information, please visit the conference website.
What might it mean to consider the ways in which connections are foreclosed, desires for union left unsatisfied, communications disrupted? A "missed connection" might be as intimate as a brush with a stranger or as literal as a dropped phone call or departing plane; it might be a forgotten or neglected history or genealogy. "Missed Connections" seeks to foreground failures or absences of connection across disciplines and methodologies. We hope for briefs against perfect transmission, network theory attuned to the gaps in coverage. We are also interested in fields of study that might come into focus for being "unconnected": the rural, the isolated (geographically and historically), the illegible, the strange/estranged.
Keynote Speaker: Laura Otis (Emory University)
University of Toronto, April 24-25 2010
Preliminary notice:
The Classics Graduate Student Association of the University of Toronto
invites abstracts for a graduate conference on the theme Engendering
Reception, to be held in Toronto on April 24-25, 2010. Our keynote
speaker will be Susanna Braund, Canada Research Chair in Latin Poetry
and its Reception, University of British Columbia.
This conference aims to consider the role gender plays in reception
both within antiquity and beyond. What does it mean when Catullus and
Horace imitate Sappho? How are epic heroines and villains portrayed in
other genres? How is gender played out in later imitations of Greek
and Roman literature (e.g. Racine's Phedre)? What are the issues
facing contemporary women writers (such as Margaret Atwood or Anne
Carson) who deal with classical topics? Our conference hopes to
explore these questions, as well as more broadly theoretical issues.
Potential topics could include, but are not limited to:
+ Intertextual heroines in antiquity
+ The reception of female authors in the ancient world
+ The use of a "female voice" by male authors
+ The interaction of historical and literary female characters
+ Women and the history of classical scholarship
+ Women and the acquisition of Classical education in the 19th and
early 20th centuries
+ Gender and the contemporary reception of the classics
We welcome submissions from students of all areas of classical
studies, as well as students from other disciplines, including art
history, history, archaeology, philosophy, comparative literature,
religious studies, women's and gender studies, drama, and politics.
A conference website will be set up shortly, and interested students
are invited to join the conference's Facebook group:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=112388917878
This is a preliminary notice. A call for papers and a submission
deadline will be circulated in the fall. Queries and indications of
interest should be directed to the conference coordinators:
Cillian O'Hogan, cillian.ohogan@utoronto.ca
Melanie Racette-Campbell, melanie.racette.campbell@utoronto.ca