Sather Center Colloquium: Transhistorical Communities

Conference Program

8:45 Tea/coffee, Introductions

Morning panel: Serendipitous Communities

Chairs: Susanna Elm (UC Berkeley), Timothy Hampton (UC Berkeley)

9:00-10:00 Daniel Heller-Roazen (Princeton University) “Chance Readers, or the Uses of Coincidence”

[Background readings: Cicero, On Divination (excerpt), trans. D. Wardle; Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, “Parapraxes,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XV, pp. 40-59.]

10:00-11:00 Boris Maslov (University of Oslo) “The Ancients and the Moderns in Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments”

[Background reading: Plutarch, How to Study Poetry (How a Young Person Should Listen to Poets), 34b-37b = 13-14, trans. F. C. Babbitt.]

11:00-11:15 Coffee break

11:15-12:15 Niklaus Largier (UC Berkeley) “The Rhetoric of Prayer”

[Background reading: Hugh of St. Victor, “On the Power of Prayer,” trans. Hugh Feiss Osb]

12:15-14:30 break for lunch

Afternoon panel: Antiquity’s Resources

Chairs: Diliana Angelova (UC Berkeley), Boris Maslov (University of Oslo)

14:30-15:30 Maria Mavroudi (UC Berkeley) “Historicized and a-historical approaches to medieval autobiography and selfhood: philology and philosophies of history as tools”

[Background reading: Glenn Most, “The Rise and Fall of Quellenforschung,” in For the Sake of Learning: Essays in Honor of Anthony Grafton, ed. Anne Blair and Anja-Silvia Goeing (Brill, 2016), 933–954.]

15:30-16:30 Christopher Siwicki (University of Oslo) “Valuing historic architecture, between today and antiquity”

[Background readings: Vitruvius, Bk. 7 (an excerpt); David C. Harvey, “Heritage Pasts and Heritage Presents: temporality, meaning and the scope of heritage studies,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 7.4 (2001): 319-338.]

1630-1645 Coffee break

1645-1745 James Ker (University of Pennsylvania) “Seneca and the Times of Consolation”

[Background reading: Seneca’s Consolatio ad Marciam]