This course presents an overview of the highlights of Roman civilization with an emphasis on major literary works and how they reflect Roman culture. The discussion sections will provide supplementary information and an opportunity to discuss topics addressed in the lectures.
 

This course will study sexuality and gender in two very different historical periods—ancient Greece and 19th-century Europe. We will read literary texts, historical documents, and critical essays to constitute a comparative analysis of systems of gender and sexuality.

This graduate seminar explores Hellenistic poetry through the concept of “geopoetics,” examining how questions of geography, environment, and place shape literary production in the aftermath of Alexander’s empire. We will consider how poets such as Callimachus, Theocritus, and Apollonius of Rhodes represent and re-organize space across multiple dimensions: the urban environment of Ptolemaic Alexandria; imperial, colonial, and local geographies; mythological and fictional (especially bucolic) landscapes. The course will investigate how Hellenistic literature reflects and responds to shifting cultural and political realities, engaging with such themes as migration, cultural hybridity, colonization, Hellenic identity, and the production and reception of Greek literature beyond the Greek mainland.