WAMS Archive

Upcoming WAMS Talk

Thursday, April 25 at 4pm
Join us on for the WAMS (Workshop on Ancient Mediterranean Studies) Talk with Alexander Loney of Wheaton College, “Death and Nostalgia in the Odyssey”. Dr. Loney will be presenting his current research on the intertwined themes of death and nostalgia in the Odyssey

Bodily Pathology and Unhealthy Politics in Alcaeus

Thursday, October 18 2018 3:00 pm

UWM Curtin Hall 866
3243 N Downer Ave
Milwaukee, WI 53211

 

Join us on Thursday, October 18 at 4:00 pm for the WAMS (Workshop on Ancient Mediterranean Studies) Talk with Prof. Ippokratis Kantzios from the University of South Florida. Kantzios will be presenting “Bodily Pathology and Unhealthy Politics in Alcaeus.”

See the event flyer for more details.

Male and Female Initiatory Paradigms and the Ending of Sophocles’ Electra

Thursday, September 20 2018 4:00 pm

UWM Curtin Hall 866
3243 N Downer Ave
Milwaukee, WI 53211

Join us on September 20 at 4:00 pm for the WAMS talk presented by Dr. Adriana Brook, Assistant Professor of Classics at Lawrence University. She will be discussing Male and Female Initiatory Paradigms and the Ending of Sophocles’ Electra.

See the event flyer for more details.

Mythbusting the Ancient Theater

Thursday, May 10 2018 4:00 pm

UWM Curtin Hall 866

Workshop in Ancient Mediterranean Studies

Dr. Mali Skotheim, PhD, Solmsen Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.
“Mythbusting the Ancient Theater”

Thursday, May 10, 2018, 4:00 pm
UWM Curtin Hall Room 866

It is often asserted that the Greek theater was in decline in the postclassical period. This model assumes that Roman cultural influence drive drama off the stages of the Greek world, while pantomime (a silent, masked dance) “replaced” spoken drama. This paradigm of the trajectory of the ancient theater was developed in the early modern period, and continues to exert a surprising level of influence today. In this talk, Dr. Skotheim will “bust” this myth about the ancient theater history, and showing how consideration of the material evidence can change our perspective on the role of drama in postclassical Greek and Roman society. Documentary sources, such as inscriptions, show that Greek theater flourished in the postclassical world, with festival performances of Greek drama lasting into the 3rd century CE. This radical revision of the traditional narrative of Greek theater history invites us all, students, teachers, and scholars, to examine the assumptions and biases of our fields, question how they came to be, and consider how to be “mythbusters” ourselves.

See the event flyer for more information.

Presented by the Workshop in Ancient Mediterranean Studies

The Cosmic Significance of Wealth Acquisition in Ancient Greece: the Athenian General Nicias as a Case Study

Sunday, April 15 2018 3:30 pm

UWM Curtin Hall 866

Workshop in Ancient Mediterranean Studies

Michael Leese, PhD, Assistant Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire
“The Cosmic Significance of Wealth Acquisition in Ancient Greece: the Athenian General Nicias as a Case Study”

Thursday, April 5, 2018. 3:30 pm
UWM Curtin Hall 866

Since Moses Finley, scholars studying the ancient economy have largely abandoned the search for cultural particularism in ancient economic mentality and behavior, and have moved instead to a New Institutional Economics approach, which is heavily grounded in modern social science theory and economic models. But while the search for what was unique about ancient mentalité has been largely left behind, a growing chorus of increasingly vocal critics is stressing the need for culturally specific models of behavior, as has been convincingly demonstrated by anthropologists. In this workshop Dr. Leese will explore the economic, political, and religious behavior of Nicias, the famous Athenian general of the Sicilian Expedition and argue that Nicias’ behavior shows how difficult it is to identify what was culturally specific about ancient Greek economic mentalité. While the cosmic significance of wealth acquisition in ancient Greece certainly differs from that of the modern world, it is still not possible to determine that religious devotion, even for someone so notoriously superstitious and pious, was the ultimate goal of his economic behavior rather than the maximization of wealth and profit that are central to modern economic models of individual behavior.

Download the event flyer

Presented by the Workshop in Ancient Mediterranean Studies

WAMS is supported by the departments of Anthropology, Art History, History, and the program in Classics within the department of Foreign Languages and Literature at UWM, and the History Department at Marquette University.

 

Assumption of Risk in Athenian Law

Thursday, September 14 2017 4:00 pm

UWM Curtin Hall 866

Workshop in Ancient Mediterranean Studies

David D. Phillips, PhD, Professor of History at UCLA
“Assumption of Risk in Athenian Law”

Thursday, September 14, 2017, 4:00 pm
UWM Curtin Hall Room 866

Dr. Phillips is a specialist in ancient Athenian law, and his recent publications include a reassessment of the legal definition of hubris in his contribution to The Topography of Violence, edited by Werner Riess and Garrett G. Fagan, and a discussion of the legal ramifications of pollution brought on by homicide in the proceedings from a conference on Greek and Hellenistic legal history in Portugal in 2015. In this seminar, he will be telling us about his recent work on “Assumption of Risk in Athenian Law,”which has just been published.

Download the event flyer

Presented by the Workshop in Ancient Mediterranean Studies

WAMS is supported by the departments of Anthropology, Art History, History, and the program in Classics within the department of Foreign Languages and Literature at UWM, and the History Department at Marquette University.

What’s the “Difference”?

Friday, December 2 2016 3:30 pm

UWM Curtin Hall 103

Workshop in Ancient Mediterranean Studies

Dr. Kevin Muse, Associate Professor of Classics, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
“What’s the ‘Difference’?  A Wealthy Father, his Spendthrift Son, and a Fragment of Callias, A Lost Dialogue by Socrates’ Student Aeschines of Sphettos”

Friday, December 2, 2016, 3:30 pm
UWM Curtain Hall Room 103

Dr. Muse will be speaking to us about Callias (III),a notorious figure in fifth-century Athens, who inherited from his father Hipponicus (II) the largest fortune in Greece and allegedly squandered nearly all of it. A patron of the itinerant intellectuals known as sophists, upon whom he lavished great sums of money, Callias appears as a salient exemplum in the dialogues of Plato and Xenophon in debates about two of the most important topics of their day and ours: education and wealth.

Aeschines of Sphettos, a lesser-known student of Socrates and contemporary of Plato and Xenophon, wrote a dialogue entitled Callias. Unfortunately, we know little about this lost work. A tantalizing fragment, preserved by the miscellanist Athenaeus, tells us that the dialogue “contains the ‘difference’ between Callias and his father.” There is no consensus on what Athenaeus means here by “difference.” With the help of a database, some cultural history, and a papyrus, this talk will show what this “difference” is, and what difference it makes.

Download the event flyer

Sponsored by the departments of Anthropology, Art History, History, and the program in Classics within the department of Ancient and Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at UWM.

Commemoration, Conflict, and the Classical Tradition: The Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery

Friday, September 23 2016 3:30 pm

UWM Mitchell Hall 158

Workshop in Ancient Mediterranean Studies

Dr. Bronwen Wickkiser, Associate Professor of Classics, Wabash College
“Commemoration, Conflict, and the Classical Tradition: The Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery”

Friday, September 23, 2016, 3:30 pm
UWM Mitchell Hall Room 158

In 1910 the United Daughters of the Confederacy commissioned sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel to design and execute a monument memorializing Confederate soldiers who died in the Civil War. In this workshop, Dr. Wickkiser will survey the design that Ezekiel chose, which includes classicizing elements; the location of the monument within a highly contested landscape of memory; and the life of Ezekiel himself, a Jew who fought for the Confederacy and remained throughout his life a passionate advocate for religious freedom. She will suggest that the Confederate Memorial offers a useful, albeit discomfiting lens through which to question regional stereotypes (North vs. South), to consider overlap and potential conflict between the ideals of religious and civil liberty, and to reflect on the history of racial and ethnic oppression in the United States well beyond the Civil War.

Download the event flyer

Presented by the Workshop in Ancient Mediterranean Studies

Supported by the departments of Anthropology, Art History, History, and the program in Classics within the department of Foreign Languages and Literature at UWM.

Reading Augustan Rome

Friday, November 13 2015 3:30 pm

UWM Curtin Hall 939

Workshop in Ancient Mediterranean Studies

Dr. Nandini Pandey, Assistant Professor of Classics, University of Wisconsin-Madison
“Reading Augustan Rome”

Friday, November 13, 2015, 3:30 pm
UWM Curtin Hall 939

Dr. Pandey’s research focuses on Latin poetry in its complex relationship with early imperial art and political power. Her current book project, Inventing Augustus: The Poetics of Power in Early Imperial Rome, explores how Vergil, Horace, and the elegists, especially Ovid, responded to Augustan iconography in ways that shaped its perception in subsequent culture. She has recently published an article on the semiotic evolution of the Julian star (TAPA, Fall 2013) and has forthcoming articles on Vergil and the Forum Augustum (Vergilius, Fall 2014) and the dilemma in Lucan’s Pharsalia (ICS, Fall 2014).

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Hosted by the Center for 21st Century Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

The Ptolemies, the Alexandria and Rosetta Decrees, and Translocal Cosmopolitanism

Friday, April 17 2015 3:30 pm

UWM Curtin Hall Room 839

Workshop in Ancient Mediterranean Studies

Dr. Christelle Fischer-Bovet, Assistant Professor of Classics, University of Southern California, and 2014-15 Solmsen Fellow, Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin-Madison
“The Ptolemies, the Alexandria and Rosetta Decrees, and Translocal Cosmopolitanism”

Friday, April 17, 2015, 3:30 pm
UWM Curtin Hall Room 839

This talk will engage with two interconnected questions. First, Dr. Fischer-Bovet will argue that the successors of Alexander the Great in Egypt, the Macedonian dynasty of the Ptolemies (323-30 BC), had imperial goals and actively built an empire, although scholarly tendency has been to consider their kingdom essentially an Egyptian national state. Second, she will turn to the role of the local elites in the imperial project. She will examine both the well-known Rosetta Stone and the newly discovered trilingual stele that record decrees of the Egyptian priests in Alexandria, who voted to introduce the cult of Macedonian king in the Egyptian temples. These steles are not simply evidence of the accumulation of culture but are producing further transcultural moments, such as feasts and festivals in honor of the king and of the dynasty. They point to the emergence of what may be called “translocal cosmopolitanism” within the Ptolemaic state.

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Hosted by the Center for 21st Century Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee