Announcement of
Seminars at 2005 Annual Meeting
The Program Committee has approved two
proposals to offer seminars at the 2005 Annual Meeting in
Boston. Sarah Iles Johnston will chair a session entitled
Divination in Ancient Greece on Friday afternoon, January 7. Susanna Morton Braund will
direct the session entitled The Gender of
Latin on Saturday
afternoon, January 8. See complete descriptions of each
seminar below.
These sessions are intended to provide
an opportunity for extensive discussion of the papers to
be presented. To this end attendance at the seminars will
be limited, and the speakers in these sessions have been
asked to make their papers available by mid October so
that registrants who attend the sessions can read them in
advance. Each will present only a brief summary of his or
her paper at the session itself.
To ensure the success of these
sessions, the Program Committee requests the following
commitments from annual meeting registrants interested in
attending a seminar.
1. Ask the Seminar Leader via
e-mail to reserve a place for you at the session. Prof.
Johnston's e-mail address is johnston.2@osu.edu.
Prof. Braund's is susannab@stanford.edu.
Attendance at each seminar will be limited to 25 persons.
2. Read each of the seminar papers
in advance of the meeting.
You may request copies of the seminar papers when you
write to the Chair. The papers will also be available on
the APA web site (www.apaclassics.org) beginning around
November 1, 2004. The Program Committee anticipates that
the majority of interested participants will simply
obtain copies of the papers from the web site.
3. Attend the entire 3-hour session
in Boston. The Program Committee feels strongly
that the success of the seminars will depend in large
part on the willingness of all participants to
participate actively for the entire session. In addition,
persons accepted for attendance at a seminar may be
taking the place of another registrant who wished to
attend the session. There will be a brief break scheduled
about halfway through each session.
4. After the seminar complete a
brief evaluation form to be prepared by the Program
Committee. The APA
program has not had a session in this format for many
years. While the Committee feels that the format has
considerable promise, there will undoubtedly be room for
improvement. Feedback from participants will therefore be
extremely important.
Below is the list of speakers and
topics for each seminar as well as a brief summary of the
session prepared by the organizer:
Divination
in Ancient Greece
Sarah
Iles Johnston, Organizer
We will examine Greek divination, a practice
that lay at the center of religious life and accompanied
many social and political processes as well. In
particular, our papers will address the means by which
divination conveyed information and the ways in which
those means were justified or challenged. Through doing
this, we also will explore the ways in which divination
reflected and validated other beliefs about the nature of
the gods, the world, and the place of humans within it,
and the ways in which divination constructed new semiotic
systems that mirrored -- or challenged -- those of
developing science and theology.
1.
Sarah Iles Johnston, Ohio State University
Introduction
2.
Lisa Maurizio, Boston College
Is There Such a Thing as a Delphic Theology?
3.
Derek Collins, University of Michigan
Mapping the Entrails: The Art of Greek
Hepatomancy
4.
Peter T. Struck, University of Pennsylvania
Natural Supernaturalism: Physical Explanations of
Divination in the Greco-Roman World
The
Gender of Latin
Susanna
Morton Braund, Organizer
The seminar will engage with Chapter 3 of
Joseph Farrell's 2001 book Latin
Language and Latin Culture from Ancient to Modern Times, where he raises the question of the gender
of Latin and concludes that in Latin culture, women play
the role of the linguistic Other. Our papers examine the
literary construction of female speech in the Roman
period and extend the enquiry into the medieval period
and beyond. This seminar will stimulate consideration of
the difficulties of recovering the female voice in Latin
and the role of the canon in perpetuating the prejudices
of ancient Romen. We may also discuss how the Latin
language contributes to the positive construction of
masculinity.
1.
Susanna Morton Braund, Stanford University
Introduction
2.
Joseph Farrell, University of Pennsylvania
Is "Female" to "Male" as "Medieval" is to
"Classical"?
3.
Holt Parker, University of Cincinnati
Women and Humanism -- Education for These
Things
4.
Sharon James, University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill
Effeminate Elegy, Comic Women, and the Gender of Language
5.
Helen Lovatt, University of Nottingham
The Eloquence of Dido: Speech and Gender in Virgil's
Aeneid
2005
Annual Meeting