Calls for Papers in Classics

To submit items for this page, please send announcement as attached files to Robin Mitchell-Boyask, robin@temple.edu

Classical Association of the Canadian West (CACW)
University of Manitoba
6-7 March 2009
Violence in Greek and Roman Antiquity

The University of Manitoba will host the next conference of the Classical Association of the Canadian West on 6-7 March 2009. The keynote speaker is Dr. Victoria Pagán of the University of Florida. Her recent books include Conspiracy Narratives in Roman History (University of Texas Press 2004) and Rome and the Literature of Gardens (Duckworth 2006).

Papers are invited on all topics of interest to Classicists, but we particularly encourage papers on topics related to the broad theme of violence in the ancient world.

Violence permeated all aspects of ancient Greek and Roman culture. Ancient literature, art, and historical evidence demonstrate that the Greeks and Romans understood the important role which violence played in their cultures. Myth provided numerous stories of acts of violence committed by both gods and humans. Watching violence in the form of gladiatorial competitions was a popular form of entertainment. The violence which initiated and later removed tyranny in Athens, as well as the regularity with which Roman emperors were assassinated, demonstrates that the Greeks and Romans understood that violence was a means of achieving political ends. Violence was also state sanctioned: the testimony of a slave was only admissible in a Roman trial if extracted under torture. And Greek tragedy explored violence as a manifestation of some of the darker aspects of human nature.

Despite the fact that Greeks and Romans were confronted by violence, both real acts of violence and representations of violence, our understanding of the phenomenon in the ancient world is still very limited. This conference aims to place Classicists in a position to understand better the complex discourses of violence in Greek and Roman history, literature, and art, as well as early modern and contemporary representations of the ancient world. The conference aims to explore violence from the perspectives of both those who commit acts of violence and their victims.

Topics might include:

violence in/ as sport and public entertainment

violence in art

ancient law and violence

ancient morality of violence

punishment and torture

spectators versus participants in acts of violence

women as victims

revenge

changing attitudes towards violence in Christian Rome

cruelty as a character trait, especially of foreigners

violence in cinematic representations of the ancient world

violence in ancient Israel, Egypt or ancient Near East versus ancient Greece and Rome

The committee strongly encourages proposals on the following themes:

violence in myth, including myths of foundation

political violence (esp. assassination)/ stasis/ discordia

violence in ancient epic

Abstracts of up to 200 words for papers of twenty minutes should be sent by Monday, 8 September 2008 to Dr. James Chlup at chlupj@cc.umanitoba.ca . The committee particularly invites proposals from those in related disciplines and graduate students. Notification of acceptance will be conveyed no later than the end of September. We will be seeking funding support for the conference from SSHRC. Therefore, titles and abstracts must also be accompanied by the following information:

Family name, given name, initials
Institutional affiliation (if any) and department
Degrees received; please identify discipline
Recent positions held
Recent publications, especially those relevant to the theme of the conference

Please also indicate any audio-visual or other requirements.

Please send proposals and enquires to: Dr. James T. Chlup, Department of Classics, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada, R3T 2M8. Phone +204 474-9171. E-mail: chlupj@cc.umanitoba.ca . Electronic submissions are preferred.

III Meeting “Moisa. International Society for the Study of Greek and Roman Music and its Cultural Heritage”

Moisa Epikhorios: Regional Music and Musical Regions

Theory and Practice in Text and Image in Ancient Greece

Ravenna, 1-3 October 2009

The Greeks were acutely aware of the regional diversity in their music and performance cultures. Profoundly tied to religious practices and expressed in myth, ritual and image, local and regional musical traditions were intricately intertwined with the construction of cultural identities, and linked to social structure. At the same time, Greek mousike was embedded in a culture of mobility: music and musicians travelled the Mediterranean crossing the boundaries of local and social fragmentation, linking the dispersed Greeks in a web of exchange. Thirdly and perhaps as a consequence, innovation and distinctions of musical idiom, such as instrumentation or tuning, harmony, mode, articulation, rhythm etc. were often associated with particular geographical regions and the social set-up of these places.

The aim of the conference is to investigate the dynamic resulting from this configuration and explore its role for the construction of identity of different varieties. Often, but not always oppositional, these identities take the study of Greek music for the first time beyond the framework of the polis: Boiotians seek regional unity through the construction of a musical culture in the service of the Boiotian league, profoundly Apolline and un-Dionysiac. For the Arkadians mousike is the touchstone of social cohesion in the rugged mountainscape of the inner Peloponnese. Islands express their otherness in discrete musical imagery reflecting the experience of maritime mobility and connectivity in an insular cosmos. Similarly, musical forms appear as a product of social interaction in the Greek world: places competed for the origins of new musical forms, as for example Korinth, Thebes or Naxos for the dithyramb. The legend of Arion suggests that the dithyramb’s invention was a Mediterranean-wide phenomenon, a product of maritime mobility and contemporary social change in the archaic period. Many musical and dramatic innovations in and around the early City Dionysia at Athens were reputedly introduced from outside, reflective of how social innovation and musical import were mutually dependent. Perhaps this is also why drama was often perceived not exclusively as an Athenian, but rather as a Hellenic performance mode.

The construction of musical geographies and local regional performance cultures was intimately linked to constantly self-renewing political identities in a historical milieu undergoing continuous and rapid social change – perhaps one reason why the Greeks engaged in a constant process of retelling and revising their musical past. Some issues are shared with the anthropology of music in the modern and contemporary Mediterranean: the focus on local and regional identities interacting with continuously changing social structures on the one hand, an overarching framework of the performance culture across the Mediterranean on the other. We hope to engage recent approaches in modern studies for the ancient Mediterranean, not least exploiting the notional borders of the Greek world, in Italy, Thrace, the Black Sea, Anatolia, Cyprus and ‘Phoenicia’. The Greeks and the civilisations around them did not have a conception of a Mediterranean identity, a relevant feature of the study of the music of the modern and contemporary Mediterranean; but one might ask whether constant contact and exchange did help to construct the Mediterranean as a shared cultural and musical space.

Barbara Kowalzig, François Lissarrague, Donatella Restani and Peter Wilson

Speakers will include

Giovanni Battista D’Alessio (London)
Claude Calame (Paris)
Daniela Castaldo (Lecce)
Paola Ceccarelli (Durham)
David Fearn (Oxford)
Mark Griffith (Berkeley)
Edith Hall (London)
Barbara Kowalzig (London)
Timothy Power (Seattle)
Lucia Prauscello (Cambridge)
Antonella Provenza (Palermo)
Stelios Psaroudakes (Athens)
Ian Rutherford (Reading)
Martin Stokes (Oxford)
Peter Wilson (Sydney)

Those who wish to offer a short paper (15/20 mins) are invited to send an abstract of max. 500 words, by 15 September 2008, to Donatella Restani (donatella.restani@unibo.it) and Barbara Kowalzig (barbara.kowalzig@rhul.ac.uk).

Religion Matters:
Material Effects of Religion on Bodies

Keynote Address by Professor Ann Pellegrini

The Religious Studies Roundtable at The Ohio State University is pleased to announce the first in what it hopes will become a series of Annual Graduate Student Conferences, to be heldOctober 4, 2008. The conference, “Religion Matters: Material Effects of Religion on Bodies," seeks to explore the effects of religion on the body, as well as collective bodies (like the nation), from a wide range of scholarly approaches.

The keynote address will be delivered by Ann Pellegrini, Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Religious Studies at New York University. Professor Pellegrini's interests include religion, sex and the law; queer theory; trauma and the performance of witnessing; and religion and performance. Her books include Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (1997); Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (2003), co-authored with Janet R. Jakobsen; and Secularisms (2008), co-edited with Janet R. Jakobsen. Professor Pellegrini's talk will address "queer structures of religious feeling."

A 19-year-old boy refuses a life saving transfusion. Monks resist government attempts to put down a diseased cow. A cancer patient finds healing in alternative forms of treatment. An abortion clinic is bombed.

Each of these is an example of the tangible and material effects of religion on the body in daily life. This conference seeks to explore the actual, daily, lived presence of religion in the world, both past and present. We especially welcome submissions about topics that might not, at first glance, be considered religious. Submissions are not limited to scholarly, non-fiction pieces but may include fiction, performance pieces or any other format that address the topic. Topics may include but are not limited to:

the consequences of belief for the body: sexual, medical, political, legal, ethical, physiological, psychological, etc.
disciplinary techniques of the body
the effect of cultivation, meditation and practice on the body
religious affects and intensities
religious trauma
religious and bio-politics in a time of war
bodily modifications
the relationship between corporeality and spirituality, religion, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity

In order to keep the conference unified while allowing for the greatest range of topics, focus should be on some material effect resulting from or explained at least in part by religion. Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be sent to van-kley.2@osu.edu by June 1, 2008. Submissions should be prepared for blind review. Proposals should not include any identifying names. Contact information should only be in the body of the email and should include your name, email address, mailing address, institution and title of your paper. Please put the title of the conference 'Religion Matters' in the subject line of your emailed abstract. Any questions can be addressed to Bridget Buchholz (buchholz.21@osu.edu) or Rita Trimble (trimble.38@osu.edu )

Who's Your Daddy? Reconstructing Paternity in the Ancient World
Classics Department, University of California at Los Angeles
Graduate Student Conference
November 7-8, 2008
(Keynote speaker: Suzanne Dixon )

The UCLA Department of Classics seeks papers for its upcoming graduate student conference, “Who’s Your Daddy? Reconstructing Paternity in the Ancient World.”

The meaning of being a father or playing the role of a father is as varied as the conceptions of masculinity. This conference aims to investigate the definitions, myths, and realities of paternity in ancient literature and culture. We wish to explore fatherhood, biological and otherwise, including both social history in the Greek and Roman world and literary and mythological fathers. We encourage the submission of papers using a variety of evidence (literary, documentary, material culture, linguistic, etc.) by students of classics and related disciplines (art history, archaeology, history, philosophy, comparative literature, etc.).

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

Depictions of paternity in myth and literature

Intersections of paternity with the slave system (slaves and slaveholders as fathers and quasi-fathers)

The term "father" in political and philosophical discourse

Theories of conception in ancient medicine

Adultery and problems of uncertain paternity

Models of adoption

The legal status of children

Depictions of fatherhood in art

The father in everyday family life

The deadline for proposals is May 22, 2008. Notification of acceptance will be e-mailed by June 27, 2008.

E-mail abstracts of no more than 300 words as a PDF or Word attachment to kpiller@ucla.edu. Please include the text of all attachments in the body of your e-mail. In your attachment, please include your name, title, affiliation, and contact information on the first page and your abstract on a second page without any identifying information.

Who's Your Daddy? Reconstructing Paternity in the Ancient World" is funded by the UCLA Department of Classics, the Campus Program Committee of the Program Activities Board, and the Graduate Students Association.

Local Identities in the Ancient Mediterranean

Berkeley, CA, November 7-8, 2008

with an opening address by Nino Luraghi, author of The Ancient Messenians: Constructions of Ethnicity and Memory (2008) and a keynote presentation by Nicola Terrenato, editor of Articulating Local Cultures: Power and Identity under the Expanding Roman Republic (2007).

The graduate students of the Department of Classics and of AHMA (Graduate Group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology) at the University of California, Berkeley, announce an open invitation for papers to be delivered at a student conference on local identity in the ancient Mediterranean world.

This conference looks to explore the ways in which local identities are formed and sustained in the ancient Mediterranean, from the Bronze Age to Late Antiquity. We seek innovative approaches to this topic, moving beyond narratives of persistence or resistance in the face of a dominant culture to discuss how local identities thrived in a diverse environment. We hope to provide a forum for exploring less frequently studied local practices and the complex reciprocal interactions of cultural exchange. Contributors may utilize evidence from all kinds of sources and disciplinary perspectives, including but not limited to epigraphy, linguistics, art, literature and material culture. Proposals might address the following themes, among others:

How do/can we reconstruct local identities?

Is the concept of a “local identity” valid in interpreting a world largely defined by cultural hybridism and an ever-growing koine?

What do language, script, and local myths and their various representations tell us about local identities?

What roles do strong local identities play in the creation of broader group identities?

How do expanding or changing political affiliations impact local identities?

What are the intersections between local identities and gender identities?

How did people negotiate dual systems of identification?

How do communities hybridize and integrate their political and religious practices in order to participate in conceptually discrete cultures?

Can high-status individuals, such as poets or orators, move more easily than others between local and wider identities?

How do local cultures define themselves against cultures conceived as “other”?

What different conceptions of place and locality are constructed where “original” populations coexist with non-native groups?

Do local historians and ethnographic writers play a role in creating and defining local identities?

Graduate students wishing to present a paper at the conference should submit a titled, anonymous abstract of 300 words or less to David Jacobson (davidj@berkeley.edu) by

June 1, 2008. Please include in the body of the email your name, paper title, email address, institution, and mailing address. Abstracts which include Greek must be sent in PDF format. For further information please contact the organizers:

Amy Russell, AHMA (arussell@berkeley.edu)

Christopher Churchill, Classics (cchurch@berkeley.edu)

David Jacobson, Classics (davidj@berkeley.edu)or see our website located within: http://classics.berkeley.edu/news/

The Eighth Biennial SHIFTING FRONTIERS IN LATE ANTIQUITY CONFERENCE: " Shifting Cultural Frontiers in Late Antiquity "
Indiana University

Bloomington, Indiana
April 2-5, 2009

The Society for Late Antiquity announces that the Eighth Biennial Conference on Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity will be held at Indiana University and will explore the theme "Shifting Cultural Frontiers in Late Antiquity" [ca. 200 - 700 AD]. The confirmed plenary speakers will be Professors Jas Elsner (Corpus Christi, Oxford) and Seth Schwartz (Jewish Theological Seminary).

Beneath the familiar political and religious narrative of late antiquity lies a cultural history both more complicated and more fascinating. Late antiquity was a time of intense cultural negotiation in which new religious communities and new populations sifted through existing modes of cultural expression, adopting many elements for themselves and turning others aside. This conference seeks to understand how cultural transformation occurred amidst the political and religious disruption that can seem characteristic of late antiquity. To this end, we seek contributions that explore three distinct areas of late antique cultural history: 1) the interaction of "high" and "low" culture, 2) the impact of changing and collapsing political centers on their peripheries, and 3) the emergence of hybrid literary, artistic, and religious modes of expression. Possible contributions to these areas may highlight the permeable division between elite and vernacular culture, the ease with which cultural memes were transmitted across geographic and linguistic boundaries, the adaptability of established cultures to new political and social realities, and the degree to which newcomers were integrated into existing cultural communities.

As in the past, the conference will provide an interdisciplinary forum for ancient historians, philologists, Orientalists, art historians, archeologists, and specialists in the early Christian, Jewish, and Muslim worlds to discuss a wide range of European, Middle-Eastern, and African evidence for cultural transformation in late antiquity. Proposals should be clearly related to the conference theme. They should state both the problem being discussed and the nature of the new insights or conclusions that will be presented.

Abstracts of not more than 500 words for 20-minute presentations may be submitted via e-mail to Prof. Edward Watts, shifting.frontiers.8@gmail.com(Department of History, Indiana University, Ballantine Hall, Rm. 828, 1020 East Kirkwood Avenue, Bloomington, IN 47405-7103, USA). The deadline for submission of abstracts is October 15, 2008. The submission of an abstract carries with it a commitment to attend the conference should the abstract be accepted.

University of Nottingham, Institute for the Study of Slavery (ISOS)
Conference: 'Slaves, Cults and Religions'

8-10 September 2008
This conference will examine the cultic and religious activities of slaves and persons from other unfree statuses. Its span embraces any part of the world in any period from antiquity to the present day. Speakers already intending to participate include colleagues from Brazil and North America, as well as Europe and the UK.

ISOS was originally founded by the late Thomas Wiedemann (Professor of Latin at the University of Nottingham), as the International Centre for the History of Slavery (ICHOS). It maintains ICHOS' original aim of giving major attention to ancient slavery alongside slavery in more recent times. Papers on the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds are therefore particularly welcome. The keynote conference speakers include Professor John North (UCL).Papers may cover cults and religions initiated by slaves themselves, or slave/unfree participation in private or public cults or organised religions controlled by the free population or master class.

Papers are equally welcome from historians of slavery and from historians of cults and religions with an interest in slave/unfree agency and participation.

Proposals, including a brief abstract (250 words), should be sent to the Co-Directors: Professor Stephen Hodkinson, Department of Classics (stephen.hodkinson@nottingham.ac.uk) and/or Professor Dick Geary, School of History (dick.geary@nottingham.ac.uk).

In 2009 the annual meeting of the Classical Association will be held jointly with the Classical Association of Scotland and hosted by the Department of Classics at the University of Glasgow. The academic sessions will take place in the Glasgow Crowne Plaza hotel; accommodation and meals will be provided by the Glasgow Crowne Plaza and the Glasgow Campanile hotels. Excursions will be arranged to the Main Campus of the University and to places of interest outwith the centre of Glasgow.

We welcome proposals for papers (20 minutes long followed by discussion) and co-ordinated panels (comprising either 3 or 4 papers) from academic staff, graduate students, and school teachers on the topics suggested below, or on any aspect of the classical world. Title and an abstract (no more than 300 words) should be sent to the address below (preferably by email) not later than 31 August 2008.

Suggested topics: the classical tradition in Scotland, neo-Latin studies, teaching and learning in the Higher Education, digital Classics, Late Antiquity, the reception of Virgil, subaltern culture and texts, religion and the city, operatic classics, geography in the Greco-Roman world, ancient theories of style, politics in the Roman Republic, Augustan poetry, political drama, comedy and humour, the ancient novel, Greek epigraphy and history, and Athenian vase-painting.

Please send your title, abstract, and any enquiries to Dr Costas Panayotakis, CA 2009, Department of Classics, 65 Oakfield Avenue, The University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, Scotland (email: ca2009@arts.gla.ac.uk; tel. +44 141 330 4383).

American Philological Association

Calls for Papers