A lecture on the multicultural study of the ancient world focusing on Greece, Rome, and Egypt, the usual suspects. This is an online event.
Registration is required.
This lecture will take place in person at ISAW (15 East 84th Street).
Registration is required at THIS LINK.
The ancient Mesopotamian world was populated with a wide range of demonic and monstrous creatures, all of which intersected with daily life in a variety of mostly-malignant ways. Most often, demons, or the chaotic figure of the witch, could cause serious harm, being associated with disease and illness, or even death, particularly in infants and young children. But these forces could also be responsible for more mundane ills, with even a run of bad luck being attributable to witchcraft. This talk will discuss some of the major threats found in Mesopotamia—the demonic, chaotic witch; the demoness Lamashtu, who was often responsible for infant mortality; and others—examining in detail how they could be safeguarded against, or actively opposed once they were believed to be present. Mesopotamian ritual practices offered a range of possible options, from the exhaustively (and expensively) detailed to simpler, even mass-produced, remedies.
Gina Konstantopoulos (PhD, University of Michigan, 2015) is an Associate Professor in Assyriology and Cuneiform Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA. Her research centers on religion, magic, and literature in Mesopotamia, with a focus on the role of demons and monsters. Her monograph on this topic, The Divine/Demonic Seven and the Place of Demons in Mesopotamia, was published in 2023 by Brill. Her current research focuses on two major projects: one on the creation of distant and imagined lands and notions of space and place in the ancient Near East, and another on the works of Enheduana and Sumerian myths of Inana.
This talk is given in conjunction with ISAW's exhibition Cursed! The Power of Magic in the Ancient World. The exhibition is organized by the Toledo Museum of Art; its presentation at ISAW is made possible by generous support from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation and the Leon Levy Foundation.
Please check isaw.nyu.edu for event updates.
Americans have been thinking about ancient Rome since the beginning. The US founders looked to Rome as a model, but also as a warning—they knew the Roman Republic collapsed into autocracy. Today, however, many Americans seem to think that autocracy—what we call the Roman Empire—is something to admire. In her new book, Lessons From A Lost Republic: What ancient Rome can teach us about this American Moment, Berenfeld offers a concise history of the Roman Republic’s collapse for a general audience and considers some unsettling parallels in our own politics. She will discuss the book, how her time at NYU (NYU ’94, ’97, ’02) contributed to it, and the process of adapting an academic career into a public-facing one.
Location:
West Basement Seminar Room
Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
1 East 78th Street
Advance registration is required. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the organizers at nyuniversitysas@gmail.com
Kleio: a History Book Club meets to discuss acclaimed and trending recent titles by distinguished authors on diverse topics from the pages of global history—from the ancient world through the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Join us as we delve into an exciting new read each month.
Registration is required.
Join them in October to discuss Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World by Mary Beard (Liverlight, 2023). Request it here.
About the book (from the NYPL catalog):
"The best-selling author of The Fires of Vesuvius presents a comprehensive history of the social and political world of the Roman emperors including Julius Caesar, Nero, Alexander Severus, Caligula, and Marcus Aurelius."
For more info or any questions, please email: Talia Varonos: tvaronos@nightingale.org
NYU Department of Classics
Silver Center for Arts and Science, Room 503
32 Waverly Place or 31 Washington Place (wheelchair access)
Scholars of body horror regularly aim to set clear parameters regarding what should or should not be considered among its representatives. Such definitions tend to draw a clear line between works of mere physical abuse and those of true body horror which feature a more holistic corporeal shift from one form to another. Put another way, such theorizations tend to differentiate between horrors enacted upon the body – wherein human flesh expires – and body horror, which births something new.
This paper probes at such a distinction by examining violence’s transformative potential. Considering David Cronenberg’s Scanners (1981) and Videodrome (1983), often examined teleologically as forerunners to the director’s richer work in body horror, alongside Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Lucan’s Bellum Civile – arguably the two ancient texts most infamous for taking apart the human form – reveals how bodies which break open and expose their vulnerable insides can complicate the aforementioned generic binary. In such cases, violence does not merely dismantle but instead reconfigures the human form by means of disintegration.
Importantly, these modern and ancient corpora pursue this effect to varying ends. For Scanners and Videodrome, bodily rupture is both horrific and desirable; in these films, taking control of one’s body requires first falling apart. In contrast, Ovid’s Marsyas and Pyramus and Lucan’s Scaeva and Libyan trek present such violence not as liberatory but the means by which the human becomes an instrumentalized object. When we acknowledge these works’ divergent answers to the question of whether corporeal abuse grants horrific agency or horribly destroys it, we encounter an intriguing possibility: that perhaps Ovid’s and Lucan’s bodies can at times be more disturbing than those crafted by the most influential name in body horror.
For more information, contact Evan Wontor Shaal: eaw9144@nyu.edu or Kimiko Adler: kja326@nyu.edu
This workshop will take place online; a Zoom link will be provided via email to registered participants.
Registration is required at THIS LINK.
Expanding the Ancient World is a series of professional development workshops and online resources for teachers. Keyed to the NYC Department of Education Social Studies Scope and Sequence, this program is designed to offer K-12 educators opportunities to develop their knowledge of the ancient world and to provide classroom-ready strategies for teaching the past with reliable sources. Featuring inquiry-based workshops, flexible lesson plans, and up-to-date research, Expanding the Ancient World aims to equip teachers with information and skills that they can share with their students. CTLE credits will be offered to New York State teachers.
The workshop invites teachers to further incorporate Roman slavery into ancient history curricula. From transactional papyri, to clever slaves on stage, to the tombstone of a child miner, we will examine slavery both as a ubiquitous legal phenomenon and as a varied spectrum of experience across the Roman world. That is, we will engage with not just the testimonies of the literary elite—largely that of enslavers—but also traces of enslaved people's lives in material and visual culture. Grounded in a series of concrete case studies, we will discuss how to present primary sources that will require students to confront some of the most challenging, and fascinating, aspects of ancient history.
We will focus on several questions: What was slavery in the Roman Empire? Who was enslaved, and how did they become enslaved? How can we learn about them? What can studying Roman slavery contribute to our understanding of both slavery and Roman history? We will also analyze together how the ancient phenomenon differed from more recent slavery, such as the Transatlantic slave trade, because of the nature of different practices, evidence preservation, and conceptions of race and ethnicity. However, the legacy of ancient slavery had a profound impact on enslavers' worldviews in the Antebellum South and beyond; we will untangle historians' anachronistic assumptions to effectively, and critically, think across periods. Ultimately, the aim is to present students with an even deeper and more accurate understanding of everyday life and human experience in the ancient world.
Workshop led by Charlotte Mandy (PhD Student, Columbia University Classical Studies).
Participants will receive 1.5 CTLE hours.
If you have any questions regarding the Expanding the Ancient World program please email ETAW@nyu.edu.
This event will take place in person at ISAW.
Registration is required at THIS LINK.
The ancient Roman cemetery is often framed as the domain of the “well deserving,” as funerary monuments frequently formulaically assert. These dead were deserving of proper burial, of commemoration, and of the ongoing provision of offerings and other cult activities that both integrated them into the community of the dead and maintained their relationships with the living. But what might happen to the “badly deserving?” By examining select case studies of social betrayal documented in Roman cemeteries from the first three centuries CE, this talk will explore efforts at enforcing postmortem punishments against those perceived to have violated Roman social norms. It will argue that these stories of betrayal, while unique in their specifics, together illuminate the ways in which private individuals could seek to impose a form of afterlife exile upon those they deemed guilty of social transgressions.
Darcy Tuttle is a Research Scholar at ISAW. Her research draws on historical, archaeological, epigraphic, and literary evidence to explore how people engaged with and related to the dead in the ancient Italy. She is an active field archaeologist with involvement in two projects based in Italy: the Gabii Project and the Southern Etruscan Tomb Survey. She recently completed her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley in the Graduate Group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology. Prior to joining ISAW, she was the recipient of the 2026 Donald and Maria Cox | Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome. She is currently working on a book project provisionally entitled, “Ghost Justice: Crime, Community, and the Roman Cult of the Dead."
Please check isaw.nyu.edu for event updates.
RSVP REQUIRED
The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
The James B. Duke House
1 East 78th Street
New York City
What does queenship mean to you? Opening to the public in 2027, Ancient Queenship: Art, Power, and Presenc is a special exhibition that explores the myriad representations of royal women in the ancient Mediterranean world throughout the first millennium BCE. The exhibition brings together art, artifacts, and media from a broad and interconnected political and cultural landscape—from Greece to Egypt and Anatolia to Mesopotamia—in order to inaugurate a new way of understanding articulations of power in the ancient world. Ancient Queenship also presents how the legacy of ancient queens impacts the art and culture of modern and contemporary societies. Bringing together ancient and contemporary works encourages visitors to confront the mythologizations and appropriations of ancient queens and their images. Moreover, the featured works by contemporary artists experiment with notions of queenship in order to interrogate social power dynamics, speculating what an equitable world might entail. What results is an exploration of how the fragmentary traces of ancient queenship have been—and continue to be—mobilized through time and space to different ends.
Join co-curator and NYU Gallatin professor Patricia Kim for a discussion about the foundations, themes, and concerns of the exhibition, as well as a presentation about the processes of curating a show about antiquity, women, and transhistorical reception for broader audiences. What are the challenges and joys of curatorial work? How can we ensure accessibility and legibility of complex concepts for broader audiences? What are the stakes of presenting stories about queenship to the public in our present world? This preview of Ancient Queenship aims to examine these questions about the intersections of curatorial practice and historical work, all while collectively pondering what queenship means today.
Ancient Queenship: Art, Power, and Presence is presented by the Cincinnati Art Museum, and will open to the public in 2027 at the Getty Villa and the Cincinnati Art Museum.
Patricia Eunji Kim, PhD is an art historian, curator, and educator based in New York City. She is Assistant Professor at New York University and author of The Art of Queenship in the Hellenistic World (Cambridge University Press, 2025), the first book-length study on the visual and material culture of queenship from western Asia and the eastern Mediterranean from the 4th to 2nd centuries BCE. This research project has led to a suite of other publications, an arts-driven public symposium, and a forthcoming exhibition at the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Getty Villa that will open to the public in 2027. Professor Kim’s research has been recognized with awards and fellowships from Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies, the Archaeological Institute of America, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others.
Abstract forthcoming
Please note: In order to enter Columbia's campus, you will need either a valid CUID or a guest access QR code. To receive guest access, please email José Romero (jmr2337@columbia.edu)
Register HERE
Italian Academy
1161 Amsterdam Avenue
New York, NY 10027
Welcoming Remarks:
Barbara Faedda
Interim Director, Italian Academy
Moderator:
Meredith Gamer
Associate Professor of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University
Fellows:
Alice Ottazzi
University of Turin (Italy)
In others’ hands: retouching and manipulating works on paper in
Early Modern Europe
Gerda Henkel Foundation Fellow in the History of Art
Marta Maria Perilli
Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (Italy)
Hidden libraries: theoretical and socio-cultural approaches to book
collections in Ancient Rome
Valentina Gioia Levy
Accademia Italiana (Italy)
Curating dissonance: Fascist and colonial afterlives in Italian heritage across public space, museum narratives, and digital counter-archives
Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation
Click here for our website.
Doors open at 3:30pm. Registration does not guarantee a seat; registrants are seated first-come, first served.
This event is in-person only.
This workshop will take place online; a Zoom link will be provided via email to registered participants.
Registration is required at THIS LINK.
Expanding the Ancient World is a series of professional development workshops and online resources for teachers. Keyed to the NYC Department of Education Social Studies Scope and Sequence, this program is designed to offer K-12 educators opportunities to develop their knowledge of the ancient world and to provide classroom-ready strategies for teaching the past with reliable sources. Featuring inquiry-based workshops, flexible lesson plans, and up-to-date research, Expanding the Ancient World aims to equip teachers with information and skills that they can share with their students. CTLE credits will be offered to New York State teachers.
This online workshop delves into how ancient people harnessed the power of the supernatural – from invoking demons to appealing to ancestral spirits. Through a series of object-based learning activities, we will explore spells, charms, and rituals that were used by magicians and witches to navigate the often-dangerous forces and entities that occupied the material and immaterial worlds. But we will also learn how people used magic for a variety of purposes and needs in everyday life. We'll consider the broader relationships between magic and religion, and how magic is still very much a part of our lives today, often in unexpected ways! While the workshop is digital, the activities are aimed to be usable both online and in the classroom.
We welcome teachers to bring their classes to visit the exhibition Cursed! The Power of Magic in the Ancient World, which is on view at ISAW through December 13, 2026.
Workshop led by Carl Walsh (ISAW Assistant Curator) and Leopoldo Fox-Zampiccoli (ISAW PhD Student).
Participants will receive 1.5 CTLE hours.
If you have any questions regarding the Expanding the Ancient World program please email ETAW@nyu.edu.
Please check isaw.nyu.edu for event updates.
This lecture will take place in person at ISAW.
Registration is required at THIS LINK.
The Leon Levy Lecture is supported by the Peter Jay Sharp Foundation and the Leon Levy Foundation.
This lecture examines how recent archaeological research has transformed the understanding of precolonial state formations in Eastern and Southern Africa. Drawing on excavations and analyses conducted over the past two decades at sites such as Kilwa Kisiwani, Songo Mnara, Mtwapa, Great Zimbabwe, Khami, and Mapungubwe, this study contends that a fundamental reconceptualization of African political complexity is underway. Archaeological evidence now demonstrates the centrality of indigenous agency in the development of coastal urban centers, the sophistication of elite strategies for accumulating and displaying power, and the intricate networks of long-distance trade that connected interior and coastal communities across the Indian Ocean world. Rather than being passive recipients of external influences, African elites actively shaped political, economic, and technological systems that sustained complex polities for centuries. This synthesis offers a comprehensive account of state formation processes, with particular attention to the mechanisms by which elites consolidated power in coastal urban settings and contributed to long-distance trade, metallurgical production, and governance structures. Recent debates concerning heterarchical versus hierarchical political organization are addressed, along with new perspectives on resilience, adaptation, and the role of local agency in state development.
Chapurukha M. Kusimba is Professor of Anthropology at the University of South Florida and Director of its Center for East Africa and Indian Ocean Studies. Trained at Kenyatta University and Bryn Mawr College, he served for nearly two decades as Curator of African Archaeology and Ethnology at the Field Museum. His work reconstructs the rise and decline of Swahili urbanism and the Indian Ocean networks linking eastern Africa to Arabia, South Asia, and China. He has directed excavations at Mtwapa, Manda, Tsavo, and Mount Elgon in Kenya. He has undertaken projects in Rwanda, India, and China, combining archaeometallurgy, ancient DNA, and community-based heritage work. His books include The Rise and Fall of Swahili States (1999), Swahili Worlds in Globalism (2024), and Kin Beneath the Label (2026). A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and past President of the Society of Africanist Archaeologists, he now studies climate change and disease in Swahili collapse.
Please check isaw.nyu.edu for event updates.
This lecture is part of the ISAW Library events series and will take place in person at ISAW.
Registration is required at THIS LINK.
Prof. Jeb Card will present a primer for understanding the use and abuse of archaeology and mythology of Ancient Southwest Asia in current and popular paranormal and conspiracy myth-making. While Biblical alternative archaeology has a long history, Card will present on direct inspirations and appropriations of Near East scholarship for more recent ideas, such as secret missions to seize a Babylonian stargate, intelligent plasma jinn, Ubaid reptilians, Denisovan Gobekli Tepe, star-sent Anunnaki, and more. These ideas are utterly discarded by professional scholars, yet they remain extraordinarily popular. Nearly half of Americans support the concept of alien involvement in human antiquity, and Card's analysis suggests that Abrahamic and Near Eastern archaeology and mythology are the largest component of how this concept is created and discussed by authors and adherents. In the twenty-first century, this idea has dramatically expanded into stranger ideas with a heavily conspiratorial aspect and an even greater emphasis on ideas wrenched and transformed from the study of ancient Southwest Asia.
Jeb J. Card is an archaeologist of Southeast Mesoamerica in the Classic, Postclassic, and Early Spanish Colonial periods. His recent research has focused on the development of paranormal subculture and practices, particularly their relationship to archaeology and antiquity. He wrote on this topic in 2018 in Spooky Archaeology: Myth and the Science of the Past with University of New Mexico Press. He is an Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Miami University.
The doors to the lecture hall will close 10 minutes after the lecture starts.
Please check isaw.nyu.edu for event updates.
The Classics Program of the CUNY Graduate Center invites prospective MA and PhD students to an Open Day information session.
RSVP: classics@gc.cuny.edu
WHEN: Friday, October 30th, 2 pm (EST)
WHERE: In person & via Zoom
→ CUNY Graduate Center Room (365 5th Ave, New York, NY 10016)
→ Room 3115
ABOUT US:
With 17 faculty members whose research interests span ancient philology, history, material culture, philosophy, and reception studies, we offer a broad-ranging curriculum in the heart of New York City as well as extensive teaching opportunities. Our students are supported in innovative, boundary-pushing work, including public-facing scholarship and digital humanities.
For the PhD, we offer five-year Graduate Center Fellowships (about $35,000/year) as well as five-year Tuition Fellowships (tuition remission) for working professionals. Student health insurance is included.
For the MA, we offer low in-state rates for New York residents as well as one MA Fellowship ($4,000 over two years). There are also competitive fellowships for summer research and dissertation completion, as well as health insurance eligibility for all students teaching at least one CUNY class.
RSVP: classics@gc.cuny.edu
URL for flyer: https://shorturl.at/32Ewx
This event will take place in person at ISAW (15 East 84th Street).
Materials will be provided. The activity demands a certain degree of hand dexterity.
Registration is required at THIS LINK.
Protect yourself with the eye of Horus or scare off all evil with the fierce face of the demon Pazuzu! At times calling on spooky spirits, at times relying on benevolent magical symbols, amulets were part of the lives of people across the ancient Mediterranean. Join us for the Galleries at ISAW's Halloween event, where you will learn to make amulets out of stone or metal, in two different activities. Adults can craft amulets out of steatite, a soft stone used by ancient peoples, under the eye of amateur steatite carver Carl Walsh. Children of all ages are invited to make their own amulet on a metal plaque featuring a fantastical monster with ISAW doctoral candidate Leopoldo Fox-Zampiccoli. Afterwards, explore the amulets on display in the exhibition Cursed! The Power of Magic in the Ancient World.
Leopoldo Fox-Zampiccoli is a doctoral candidate at ISAW and the museum practicum student for 2026. They focus on the history, heritage, and languages of the eastern Mediterranean in the Bronze and Iron Ages through engaged, collective, and people-centered ways of researching and sharing history. Their research engages with collective memory, ecology, decolonial and queer studies, heritage, and contemporary art. Leopoldo is currently also part of the Turkmen-Karahöyük Archaeological Project (Turkey), a scientific committee member for the Festival dei Matti in Venice (Italy), and an occasional collaborator with the David Graeber Institute. They have previously studied in Venice, Leiden, and Jerusalem; have taken part in archaeological projects in Turkey, Italy, Israel-Palestine, Iraq, and Czechia; and have run multiple workshops and collective performances in New York, Italy, and Turkey.
Dr. Carl Walsh is an assistant exhibition curator at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. He is dedicated to crafting accessible and engaging stories about the ancient world and has curated multiple exhibitions at ISAW covering the ancient societies of Iraq, Etruria, Islamic Spain, and Egypt, as well as early modern art and photography. He co-edited Teaching Ancient Egypt in Museums: Pedagogies in Practice (2024), which delves into ethical best practices for engaging learners with ancient Egypt using museum objects, and is currently working on a follow up volume that looks more broadly at teaching on ancient West Asia, North Africa, and the Mediterranean in museums. Carl's research focuses on Bronze Age cross-cultural interactions and his current projects center on the material culture—such as board games, cosmetics, furniture, and pottery—of the kingdom of Kerma (Kush) in modern Sudan, to consider how these objects reveal the complex interactions between societies across North Africa.
This workshop is offered in conjunction with ISAW's exhibition Cursed! The Power of Magic in the Ancient World. The exhibition is organized by the Toledo Museum of Art; its presentation at ISAW is made possible by generous support from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation and the Leon Levy Foundation.
Please check isaw.nyu.edu for event updates.
Register HERE
617 Kent Hall
1140 Amsterdam Avenue
The Jews of Asia Minor, 214 BCE to 500 CE: Text and Materiality, explores the benefits and pitfalls of writing about an archaeologically rich but literarily poor topic. The results of this inquiry are strongly revisionist: The Jews in ancient Asia Minor, or Anatolia, are shown to have been far from having achieved a perfect balance between integration in their host cities and self-preservation that scholars have long ascribed to them. Rather, the Jews experienced conflict and poverty, struggling to carve out a place for themselves in the Greek cities of Asia. Jewish communal institutions played little role before Late Antiquity, but Jews sometimes achieved a diffuse sense of community through trade guild membership and participation in theatrical events. Surprisingly, many of them expressed pride in their Roman identity but rarely, or never, their local civic identity. Even during the Jews’ brief period of prosperity and heightened civic engagement, c. 400 CE, their Jewish lives were characterized by strong localism, featuring many elements that distinguish the Jews of Asia sharply from those elsewhere in the Roman Empire.
Seth Schwartz is the Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Classical Jewish Civilization in the Departments of History and Classics at Columbia University, where he also chairs the Graduate Program in Classical Studies. He received his PhD in History at Columbia in 1985. Before returning to Columbia in 2009, Schwartz taught at Cornell, the University of Rhode Island and the Jewish Theological Seminary, had research fellowships at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Harvard Society of Fellows and King’s College Cambridge. He wrote Consuls of the Later Roman Empire (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987)(with Roger Bagnall, Alan Cameron and Klaas Worp), Josephus and Judaean Politics (Leiden: Brill, 1990), Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 BCE to 640 CE (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society? Reciprocity and Solidarity in Ancient Judaism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), and The Ancient Jews From Alexander to Muhammad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
*Guests must register by Monday, November 2, to be approved for campus access; unregistered guests will not be permitted on campus. Each guest must register individually using a unique email address.
This lecture will take place in person at ISAW (15 East 84th Street).
Registration is required at THIS LINK.
For the ancient Egyptians, magic was not an illicit alternative to religion or a mysterious violation of the natural world. Heka—the force usually translated as “magic”—was woven into creation itself and provided gods and humans with the causative power to make things happen. Drawing on texts and objects featured in the ISAW exhibition Cursed! The Power of Magic in the Ancient World, this lecture explores how Egyptians used spoken spells, written words, images, amulets, ritual actions, and sacred substances to heal the sick, protect children, defeat enemies, communicate with the dead, and transform their spirits. Seen from an Egyptian perspective, cursing, curing, and creating were not separate domains but different expressions of a world in which magic was an expected part of everyday life.
Foy Scalf is Director of the Data Research Center and Research Archives at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures of the University of Chicago. An Egyptologist specializing in ancient Egyptian texts, intellectual culture, and religious traditions, he received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2014. He edited Book of the Dead: Becoming God in Ancient Egypt (2017), The Book of the Dead: Ancient Egyptian Manuscripts in the J. Paul Getty Museum (forthcoming 2027), and contributed the chapter “Magic in Ancient Egypt” to the catalogue for the exhibition Cursed! The Power of Magic in the Ancient World.
This talk is given in conjunction with ISAW's exhibition Cursed! The Power of Magic in the Ancient World. The exhibition is organized by the Toledo Museum of Art; its presentation at ISAW is made possible by generous support from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation and the Leon Levy Foundation. Please check isaw.nyu.edu for event updates. ISAW is committed to providing a positive and educational experience for all guests and participants who attend our public programming. We ask that all attendees follow the guidelines listed in our community standards policy.
Please check isaw.nyu.edu for event updates.
ISAW's open house for prospective doctoral students will take place online; a Zoom link will be provided via email to registered participants.
Registration is required at this THIS LINK.
Prospective students who are interested in the ISAW Doctoral Program in the Ancient World are invited to attend a "virtual" open house on November 5, 2026.
The schedule of events for the day will include:
10:00am
Meet the ISAW Faculty
11:00am
Program Information Session with Associate Director for Academic Affairs and Director of Graduate Studies
11:30am
Q&A with Current Students
12:00pm
Information Session on Archaeological Fieldwork Opportunities
12:15pm
Information Session on Digital Humanities at ISAW
12:30pm
Information Session on ISAW Library
12:45pm
Information Session on ISAW Exhibitions Program
For more information, please contact Marc LeBlanc, Associate Director for Academic Affairs.
Please check isaw.nyu.edu for event updates.
In person at the CUNY Graduate Center, Room 7395
Or via Zoom
Please RSVP: rkousser@gc.cuny.edu
Happiness in life can often be achieved by reverse-engineering the causes of misfortune. Greek tragedy teaches us that human happiness is vulnerable to uncontrollable events and culpable mistakes alike: the inescapable net of circumstances outside one’s control is equally decisive with human passions and ignorance. In the words of Thucydides (2.87.3), “we must believe that men may fail as the result of fortune, while remaining steadfastly brave in their purpose”. In tragedy, as in life, there seems to be a key transitional moment that initiates the abrupt downfall not only of humans and heroes, but also of empires and prominent regional hegemonies. Despite extensive scholarly analysis of this process from Homer to Attic tragedy, no organized attempt has been made to address the notion of happiness and the circumstances that define it in Greek tragedy. Focusing on the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides along with their preserved fragments, my research investigates key terms such as olbos, eutychia, eudaimonia, along with the complex conceptualizations of happiness and resilience within the framework of Greek drama. In a modern post-pandemic world facing renewed existential questions, we frequently find ourselves approaching “happiness” solely as pleasure, comfort, or increase in life satisfaction by consumerism. But Attic tragedy offers a crucial reminder to look deeper into human nature: “Wisdom is the supreme part of happiness”, as Sophocles suggests in Antigone.
The International Ovidian Society announces its W.S. Anderson Graduate Student Paper Prize, to be awarded to the author of the best paper on Ovid and/or his reception submitted to the Selection Committee. Authors must be in an MA or PhD program, but anyone may nominate papers, and self-nominations are strongly encouraged. Submitted papers must be scripts of 15- to 30-minute oral presentations delivered at academic conferences or meetings that took place in the academic year prior to the award. Any paper delivered between September 1, 2025, and August 31, 2026, will be eligible for this year’s award. The submission deadline is November 8, 2026.
Submissions should include, in an email: 1) The presenter’s name, affiliation, and email address; 2) brief details about the conference submission; and 3) an attached copy of the paper and attendant handout or PowerPoint presentation. Neither the paper nor any other supporting documents should contain any information that would identify the author. Papers may be submitted in any language. Submissions will be reviewed blind by a joint committee of faculty and graduate students. The award will be presented at the Business Meeting of the IOS during the SCS meeting in Boston, January 2027.
Please send submissions by November 8, 2026, to the IOS Secretary, Daniel Libatique, at dlibatique@fairfield.edu.
Please direct questions to the IOS Graduate Liaison, Jose Romero, at jmr2337@columbia.edu.
NYU Department of Classics
Silver Center for Arts and Science, Room 503
32 Waverly Place or 31 Washington Place (wheelchair access)
In a series of now classic lectures, the nineteenth century critic and poet Matthew Arnold famously analyzed the Homeric poems with a view to clarifying the essential characteristics that a translation should honor; and while no translator would regard these as creating a blueprint, most translators make some reference to them. At the least, the “Arnoldian canon” provides a useful framework in which to discuss the criteria of a good translation and to address core questions: Must a good translation be faithful to the original text? Is there such a thing as a faithful translation? Do criteria remain the same through different eras? I discuss the decisions that inform my translations of both the Iliad and my forthcoming translation of the Odyssey.
For more information, contact Evan Wontor Shaal: eaw9144@nyu.edu or Kimiko Adler: kja326@nyu.edu
24 West 12th Street, New York, NY 10011
The NYU Medieval and Renaissance Center presents the book talk
Antiquity Made Whole: The Renaissance Continuation of Ancient Literature with Leah Whittington
This event is free and open to the public. Guests who do not have an NYU ID card should email marc.center@nyu.edu for building access.
This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Classics.
Abstract forthcoming
Please note: In order to enter Columbia's campus, you will need either a valid CUID or a guest access QR code. To receive guest access, please email José Romero (jmr2337@columbia.edu)
This workshop will take place online; a Zoom link will be provided via email to registered participants.
Registration is required at THIS LINK.
Expanding the Ancient World is a series of professional development workshops and online resources for teachers. Keyed to the NYC Department of Education Social Studies Scope and Sequence, this program is designed to offer K-12 educators opportunities to develop their knowledge of the ancient world and to provide classroom-ready strategies for teaching the past with reliable sources. Featuring inquiry-based workshops, flexible lesson plans, and up-to-date research, Expanding the Ancient World aims to equip teachers with information and skills that they can share with their students. CTLE credits will be offered to New York State teachers.
Visual art is an invaluable resource for the study of the ancient world. Through visual representations we can assess many aspects of past cultures, from daily life to belief systems, politics, economy, and more. One of the most informative types of art for understanding ancient Greek culture of the Archaic and Classical periods (c. 800–323 BCE) is vase painting. In this workshop, we will examine gender through ancient Greek painted vases, with a focus on vases produced in Attica, first by discussing how and why decorated terracotta vases were produced and how they were used. We will analyze pictorial scenes on ancient Greek painted vases to assess how gender operated in Greek society in the Archaic and Classical periods, touching on traditional and ideal roles, activity, and physical appearance for men and women, as well as mythic and human figures that challenged gendered ideals. Furthermore, we will interrogate how and why we use art as a type of evidence and consider how cultural values and beliefs inform artistic visual representation. The lesson plan from this workshop aims to equip students with skills to critically describe, evaluate, and assess visual primary sources as a tool for understanding the past; to inform them about values, beliefs, and daily life in Greek culture; and to reflect on the importance of individual and group identity within cultures both ancient and modern.
Workshop led by Anna Selden (ISAW PhD Student).
Participants will receive 1.5 CTLE hours.
If you have any questions regarding the Expanding the Ancient World program please email ETAW@nyu.edu.
Please check isaw.nyu.edu for event updates.
Join them in November to discuss The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World by William Dalrymple (Bloomsbury, 2025).
Registration required.
Room 204
Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library (SNFL)
Kleio: a History Book Club meets to discuss acclaimed and trending recent titles by distinguished authors on diverse topics from the pages of global history—from the ancient world through the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Join us as we delve into an exciting new read each month.
Join us in November to discuss The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World by William Dalrymple (Bloomsbury, 2025). Request it here.
"A soaring history of India's underrecognized role in producing the world as we know it. For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilization, creating around it a vast empire of ideas. Indian art, religions, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics, and mythology blazed a trail across the world, along a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific. In The Golden Road, William Dalrymple draws from a lifetime of scholarship to highlight India's oft forgotten position as the heart of ancient Eurasia. For the first time, he gives a name to this spread of Indian ideas that transformed the world. From the largest Hindu temple in the world at Angkor Wat to the Buddhism of China, from the trade that helped fund the Roman Empire to the creation of the numerals we use today (including zero), India transformed the culture and technology of its ancient world -- and our world today as we know it."
REGISTRATION REQUIRED
**Note different locations for each day
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 19 [Register here]
NYU Center for Ancient Studies
31 Washington Place, Room 101A, New York, NY 10003
Keynote: The Discovery of a New Temple and an Imported Greek Kore at Vulci
Paul Pasieka (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz)
Mariachiara Franceschini (Institut für Archäologische Wissenschaften, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg)
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 20 [Conference talks; registration link coming]
Columbia University
Schermerhorn Hall, 8th Floor
1190 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027
conference talks
Moderator: Francesco de Angelis (Columbia University)
Mariachiara Franceschini (University of Freiburg)
Giovanna Bagnasco Gianni (University of Milan)
John Hopkins (NYU)
Christian Mazet (British Museum)
Paul Pasieka (University of Mainz)
Peter Thompson (Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford)
Abstract forthcoming
Please note: In order to enter Columbia's campus, you will need either a valid CUID or a guest access QR code. To receive guest access, please email José Romero (jmr2337@columbia.edu)
This lecture will take place in person at ISAW.
Registration is required at THIS LINK.
Conventional studies of ancient Jewish prayer and its evolution focus primarily on recitations or performances of precatory texts, liturgy, or poetry once conducted inside Jewish homes, synagogues, and study halls. This talk adopts a different focus: it considers inextricable connections between the minds, hearts, and bodies of Jewish supplicants and the portable things that they once attached to their bodies with strings and cords, including inscribed amulets and phylacteries of various sorts. Through explorations of objects from ISAW’s exhibition Cursed! The Power of Magic in the Ancient World, as well as those found in other museum exhibitions and collections, this lecture examines haptic and material dimensions of Jewish prayer, as facilitated through attention to wearable objects that originally encased hidden texts. Drawing additional insights from recent studies of ancient magic and ritual power throughout Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Mesopotamian cultural orbits, as well as neglected archaeological discoveries from synagogue contexts, the lecture offers novel insights into relationships between amulets and phylacteries, Jewish prayer, and the complex “marketplace” of religions throughout the ancient world.
Karen B. Stern (PhD Brown University, 2006) is an award-winning author and professor at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research synthesizes studies of archaeology, art, and graffiti to reimagine the cultural histories, material cultures, and sensory experiences of Jews and their neighbors throughout the ancient Mediterranean world. She is author of Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgotten Jews of Antiquity (Princeton University Press 2018; paperback ed. 2020), winner of a 2020 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award; Inscribing Devotion and Death: Archaeological Evidence for Jewish Populations of North Africa (Brill 2008); and co-editor of With the Loyal You Show Yourself Loyal: Essays on Relationships in the Hebrew Bible in Honor of Saul M. Olyan (SBL Press 2021). Research grants, fellowships, and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, the Getty Villa, the Center for Jewish History, and others have supported her academic and field research. Her current book project, ‘Sacred: Archaeology of the Senses in the Ancient Synagogue,’ investigates experiential and multi-sensory dimensions of Jewish devotional life in antiquity.
This talk is given in conjunction with ISAW's exhibition Cursed! The Power of Magic in the Ancient World. The exhibition is organized by the Toledo Museum of Art; its presentation at ISAW is made possible by generous support from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation and the Leon Levy Foundation.
Please check isaw.nyu.edu for event updates.
This workshop will take place online; a Zoom link will be provided via email to registered participants.
Registration is required at THIS LINK.
Expanding the Ancient World is a series of professional development workshops and online resources for teachers. Keyed to the NYC Department of Education Social Studies Scope and Sequence, this program is designed to offer K-12 educators opportunities to develop their knowledge of the ancient world and to provide classroom-ready strategies for teaching the past with reliable sources. Featuring inquiry-based workshops, flexible lesson plans, and up-to-date research, Expanding the Ancient World aims to equip teachers with information and skills that they can share with their students. CTLE credits will be offered to New York State teachers.
This workshop will provide educators with an understanding of what bones can tell us about the past. Participants will learn how parts of who we are get left behind on our skeletons – and how to read them! With actionable examples, you will learn how bioarchaeologists estimate sex, look for evidence of malnutrition, and identify medical interventions like surgery.
Workshop content will cover an introduction to bioarchaeology followed by a discussion of methods used to study skeletons, including archaeological science approaches like ancient DNA extraction and isotope analysis. We will discuss how bioarchaeologists build biological profiles by estimating sex, age, height, and other key pieces of information. We will then go over the study of disease and traumatic injury in bone with fascinating examples from across the ancient world. An overview of funerary archaeology will also be covered, emphasizing the importance of viewing a burial through the lens of the funeral. Educators will come away with an understanding of how bones are studied, what to look for when viewing human remains, and how to incorporate bioarchaeology into the classroom – and make it exciting!
Note: This presentation will contain discussions of violence and images of human remains.
Workshop led by Talia Sankari (ISAW PhD Student).
Participants will receive 1.5 CTLE hours.
If you have any questions regarding the Expanding the Ancient World program please email ETAW@nyu.edu.
Please check isaw.nyu.edu for event updates.
Submission Guidelines (PDF also found here)
Presentations will be 15 minutes in length, followed by 5 minutes for questions.
Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words (plus a select bibliography) in PDF format to cunyclassicsconference@gmail.com no later than Dec 8th. Decisions will be made anonymously. Kindly include your full name and affiliation in the body of your email.
For questions, please contact the co-organizers: Rebecca Tauscher (Rebecca.Tauscher80@gc.cuny.edu) and Jason Palladino (Jason.Palladino73@gc.cuny.edu)
Graduate students and advanced undergraduates specializing in the ancient world (Classical and Near Eastern Studies, history, archaeology, anthropology, religious studies, philosophy, comparative literature, etc.) are welcome to submit. We are especially interested in scholarship that employs interdisciplinary approaches to the ancient world.
In the early lines of the Aeneid, Virgil describes Italy as “ .... a place that the Greeks named Hesperia, an ancient land, mighty in arms and wealthy in soil. ” (1.530-1). And in Book 7, Virgil reveals a rich land full of languages, cultures, and people. In a time before Italy became the center of the Classical world, these cultures exemplify what makes the peninsula unique and set the stage for the Roman Empire. These distinct groups were not isolated; they were united with the wider Mediterranean through trade, colonization, religion, and even war.
This year, the Classics Department at the CUNY Graduate Center invites papers that explore Italy’s cultural landscape from the Archaic Period through the Age of Augustus. A milieu that brought the Romans together with Etruscans, Italic tribes, Punic-speaking traders, and Greek colonists. We welcome papers that address, but are not limited to, the following themes:
Material culture of the Mediterranean basin
Material culture of the Mediterranean basin
Religion and mystery cults
Political relations involving early Italic cultures
Languages and dialects
Cultural connectivity
Trade, migration, and warfare
Classical Reception
Lecture Hall of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World
More info forthcoming; see the ISAW event page.
More info forthcoming; see the website for The National Arts Club for more info closer to the event.
All programs are open to the public and free with registration.
Abstract forthcoming
Please note: In order to enter Columbia's campus, you will need either a valid CUID or a guest access QR code. To receive guest access, please email José Romero (jmr2337@columbia.edu)
Please save the date!
Abstract forthcoming
Please note: In order to enter Columbia's campus, you will need either a valid CUID or a guest access QR code. To receive guest access, please email José Romero (jmr2337@columbia.edu)
Abstract forthcoming
Please note: In order to enter Columbia's campus, you will need either a valid CUID or a guest access QR code. To receive guest access, please email José Romero (jmr2337@columbia.edu)
At this time, only a call for papers has gone out.
Keynote Speaker: TBD
Please save the date!
RSVP for Zoom link: rkousser@gc.cuny.edu
This talk will discuss historical depictions of Goths and Huns during the “Age of Attila,” (fourth through early sixth centuries), a period in which the steppe peoples played an increasingly important role in the Roman Empire, from the work of the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus, expressing normative ideas about barbarians in the traditional center of empire, Rome, to Jordanes, a man of Gothic descent writing in the new imperial core of Constantinople. An analysis of the representation of Goths and Huns affirms that late antique Romanitas, or Romanness, is gendered, so that to be a Roman is to have access to hegemonic masculinity, or to dominate and conquer others, while Romans dehumanized and racialized said others. Jordanes’s desire to distance the Goths from other barbarians and associate them instead with the Romans in the Goth’s mythological past also shows that despite the reinforcement of the dichotomy between the Roman and the barbarian in the third century, Romanitas remained an aspirational identity, one which male Goths, as well as free Roman woman, could not fully realize, but attempted to approach, to limit who could exercise dominion over them. Lastly, it will discuss how in the late antique Roman and post-Roman Mediterranean, Romanness functioned much like whiteness does today.
Monday, October 5, 2026, 6:15pm
NYU Department of Classics
Silver Center for Arts and Science, Room 503
32 Waverly Place or 31 Washington Place (wheelchair access)
The reception of Empedocles in Latin epic has long drawn scholarly attention. Studies have examined Ennius’, Vergil’s, Ovid’s, and Lucan’s engagement with Empedoclean philosophy. More recently the scholarly debate has shifted to the question of whether Empedocles’ influence extends beyond the Julio-Claudian Age. In this paper I contribute to this discussion by suggesting that in his Thebaid Statius systematically evokes Empedocles’ cosmology. More specifically, I show that the contention of Pietas and Tisiphone in books 1 and 11 and the encounter of Venus and Mars in book 3 can be interpreted allegorically as representations of Empedocles’ dialectic of Love and Strife. In both cases the agent of Strife conquers, forcing the embodiment of Love to withdraw. This analysis reveals that Statius compares the clash between Eteocles and Polynices with the second phase of Empedocles’ cosmic cycle, in which Strife prevails and Love fades away, and its outcome with the third phase, in which chaos dominates. In this light, Theseus’ intervention in book 12, which aims to recompose the unity of the Theban community, may be viewed, at least on the surface, as the reappearance of Love, and thus as the beginning of a new age for the city. Considering that the fratricidal conflict set in mythical Thebes is commonly interpreted as a reflection of the civil war fought in Rome in 68-69 CE, and the triumph of Theseus is linked to the accession of the Flavian dynasty to the throne of Rome,this Empedoclean reading of the Thebaid sheds new light on the overall political message of the poem.
For more information, contact Evan Wontor Shaal: eaw9144@nyu.edu or Kimiko Adler: kja326@nyu.edu
New York, October 2–4, 2026
The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) & The Institute of Fine Arts (IFA), New York University
“Signs in Motion” examines the changing forms and meanings of hieroglyphic signs from the Late Period through the Roman era, illuminating the intellectual vitality of Egypt’s “last scholars,” their intricate games with signs, and their negotiations with the other cultures active in Egypt. The conference will explore how individual signs developed, disappeared, and were revived; how variations responded to particular monuments, materials, genres, and registers; and how earlier traditions informed the development of Ptolemaic hieroglyphs. At the same time, it will place Egyptian scribal culture within a broader Mediterranean context, asking how Egyptian, Persian, Greek, and Roman linguistic and intellectual traditions interacted within shared imperial frameworks. Particular attention will be given to the transmission of ideas about hieroglyphs, the production of Egyptian writing beyond Egypt itself, and the relationship between local scholarly traditions and Greek and Roman conceptions of the symbolic power of hieroglyphic writing.
The conference brings together scholars of Late Period, Hellenistic, and Roman Egypt and scholars of the wider Greco-Roman world to reflect on Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. Together with papers addressing both the Egyptian evidence and the Greek and Latin traditions that engaged with Egypt’s writing system, these lectures will frame a three-day conversation on the transformation, interpretation, and cultural mobility of hieroglyphic signs between the seventh century BCE and the fourth century CE.
“Signs in Motion” has been made possible through the generous support of The Stanwood Cockey Lodge Foundation of the Department of Classics at Columbia University, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Institute of Fine Arts (IFA), and The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) at New York University.
See the schedule of events here.
Register HERE
31 Washington Place
Jurow Lecture Hall (Room 101A)
New York, NY 10003
Our understanding of the development of Athenian society during the early first millennium BCE has long relied primarily on archaeological evidence, especially funerary remains, and on textual sources of mostly later date. Bioarchaeological data, by contrast, have remained scarce. Archaeological research has traditionally focused on the spatial organization of cemeteries, grave typologies, mortuary practices and rituals, as well as the style and iconography of grave markers. Yet fundamental questions about the social fabric of early Athenian kinship practices and human mobility remain unresolved. What social units did burial plots represent? To what extent did biological kinship shape the organization of cemeteries? How were individuals of different sex, age, origin etc. buried – within the same plot, across different plots, or in neighboring cemeteries?
Within the ongoing collaboration of the Ephorates of Athens and Attica and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, we have generated archaeogenetic data from more than 200 individuals recovered from cemeteries across Attica dating to the first millennium BCE, with a particular focus on the renowned cemetery of Phaleron. In my lecture, I present the current state of the project and explore how ancient DNA is transforming our understanding of social organization, kinship structures, mobility, and marital practices in Early Iron Age Attica.
PHILIPP W. STOCKHAMMER is Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology with a focus on the Eastern Mediterranean at Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) in Munich, Co-Director of the Max Planck-Harvard Research Centre for the Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and Honorary Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark. In 2008, he received his doctorate from Heidelberg University and subsequently several prestigious grants and prizes (ERC Starting Grant 2015, ERC Consolidator Grant 2020, ERC PERA Grant 2024). He leads collaborative research projects on the Bronze and Early Iron Ages from Central Europe to the Eastern Mediterranean. His research focuses on transcultural entanglements, social practices and the integration of archaeological and scientific data concerning identity, social belonging, mobility, nutrition and health. He is very committed to public outreach and is actively involved in the production of archaeological documentaries and video games.
If you have any questions or will require special accommodations, please contact archaeology@nyu.edu
Online & in person at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Bruno Walter Auditorium
The event is free but requires registration.
This event will take place online via Zoom as well as in person at The Library for the Performing Arts. A streaming link will be emailed to everyone on the morning of the event for those wishing to attend virtually.
In the middle of the twentieth century, renowned dancer and choreographer, Martha Graham, and sculptor and set designer, Isamu Noguchi, collaborated on a group of dances based on Greek myth. In this program, Ancona draws material from her new book, Martha Graham’s Greek Myth-Based Dances and Her Collaboration with Isamu Noguchi (Bloomsbury Academic 2026), which argues that the bold and woman-centered receptions of Greek myth created by Graham emerged from Graham and Noguchi’s mutual understandings of space and movement, objects and bodies. She traces the influences of ancient Greek myth on these dances as well as the ways in which Graham (and Noguchi) have created something new from this heritage through their own interpretations. This presentation will include photos and video clips from the Jerome Robbins Dance Division.
For more than 10 years, The Dance Historian Is In at the Library for the Performing Arts has highlighted a diverse range of dancers and choreographers across history. This series began when archivist and historian David Vaughan started volunteering at the Jerome Robbins Dance Division. Vaughan began a monthly program showing his favorite dance films from the Division's extensive collection, through which he unearthed many treasures, and helped acquire even more. Vaughan continued the series until the end of his life. Today, we honor his memory and work by inviting dance historians from all over the world each month to carry on the tradition of highlighting dance history through the Dance Division's moving image collection.
Photo Credit: Martha Graham as the Sorceress in Cave of the Heart. Photo by Cris Alexander, 1947. Jerome Robbins Dance Division.
Alessandro Battaglia
NYU Classics
This workshop will take place online; a Zoom link will be provided via email to registered participants.
Registration is required at THIS LINK.
Expanding the Ancient World is a series of professional development workshops and online resources for teachers. Keyed to the NYC Department of Education Social Studies Scope and Sequence, this program is designed to offer K-12 educators opportunities to develop their knowledge of the ancient world and to provide classroom-ready strategies for teaching the past with reliable sources. Featuring inquiry-based workshops, flexible lesson plans, and up-to-date research, Expanding the Ancient World aims to equip teachers with information and skills that they can share with their students. CTLE credits will be offered to New York State teachers.
This workshop explores the organization, equipment, and social life of the Roman army. Everyone knows the Roman army was a powerful military force, but did you know it did much more than fight wars? It developed the road network that tied the empire together, brought men from around the Mediterranean to defend the borders, and took Rome from a village on the banks of a modest Italian river to unrivaled mastery. Along the way, it brought fame and power to Cincinnatus, Julius Caesar, and Constantine—to name just a few! This workshop will explore the life and times of the Roman army—how it fought, what it looked like, and what its soldiers were up to when they weren't at war. You'll get a sense of the wealth of surviving evidence: from literature and fine sculpture to the letters soldiers wrote, the shoes they wore, and the tombstones they designed for themselves.
The presentation will provide an introduction to the study of the Roman military by providing a classroom-ready lecture on its equipment, tactics, and life outside the battlefield. We will look at different artifacts that inform us on Roman military life, trying to understand both their battlefield-usage and their ability to help us reconstruct other information about its owner, including social status and/or artistic preferences. We will also conduct two exercises, designed to get the students to think about the realities of Roman warfare as well as the soldiers' life during peace times. The first exercise will present a siege from antiquity and walk students through a problem-solving exercise, as well as a Living Past experience, where they will be asked to imagine themselves as a Roman officer attempting to besiege an enemy city. The second exercise will present students with one of the Vindolanda inscriptions, in this specific case the first clearly identifiable female writing preserved from the ancient world (Tab.Vindol. 291). The exercise will ask students to imagine what life on the frontiers implied for the Roman soldiers and their families.
Workshop led by Alessandro Battaglia (Faculty Fellow in Roman History, NYU Department of Classics).
Participants will receive 1.5 CTLE hours.
If you have any questions regarding the Expanding the Ancient World program please email ETAW@nyu.edu.
Please check isaw.nyu.edu for event updates.
CBA Studio
16 Cooper Square
New York, NY 10003
Dance is always about presence: movement in the living, breathing moment, no matter how classical. Antiquity, by contrast, is absence: everything is lost but for some incomplete texts and broken objects. What, then, does it mean to call a dance “classical,” and what can the ancient world really tell us about traditions still performed today?
In this lecture, classicist Barbara Graziosi (Princeton) brings newly examined ancient evidence into dialogue with live performances by dancers trained in kathak and ballet: two traditions each shadowed by contested claims to antiquity, and each capable of provoking real resentment when those claims are challenged or imposed. Working with Kathak artist Radha Varadan and Sara Mearns (Principal Dancer, New York City Ballet), Graziosi traces overlooked historical connections between narrative dance in the ancient Mediterranean and the Indian subcontinent and proposes a fresh way of understanding “the classical” not as a fixed inheritance from the past, but as something made new through embodied practice, contact, and collaboration.
Please register to attend this event.
All guests are required to register in advance of our event and bring photo ID to gain entrance to NYU facilities. Failure to do so may result in entry denial.
All non-NYU guests must be registered in NYU’s guest access system. The information will be used for purposes such as emergency procedures and contact tracing. We thank you for your cooperation!
CBA provides reasonable accommodations to people with disabilities. Requests for accommodations should be submitted at least two weeks in advance. Please email cba@nyu.edu for assistance.
This event is co-sponsored by NYU Center for Ancient Studies, NYU Art History, NYU Classics, and is presented as the annual Rose-Marie Lewent Conference in Ancient Studies.
Led by Leopoldo Fox-Zampiccoli, ISAW PhD Student
Registration is required at THIS LINK.
Rediscover your inner sense of magic in this hands-on workshop at the Galleries at ISAW! Guided by ISAW PhD candidate Leopoldo Fox-Zampiccoli, participants will learn how people in the past channeled their hopes and fears, loves and rivalries, and more by writing spells on amulets and talismans. We will connect with the experiences of our ancient peers by inscribing our own magical poetic verses and protective images on metal plaques, a practice attested across the Mediterranean over many centuries. Informed by insights from archaeology, psychology, linguistics, and poetry, this workshop will be a space for reflection and an opportunity to listen to our needs, re-tune to the rhythm of the cosmos, and reclaim a magical approach to the world through writing and drawing (no skill or experience needed!).
Leopoldo Fox-Zampiccoli is a doctoral candidate at ISAW and the museum practicum student for 2026. They focus on the history, heritage, and languages of the eastern Mediterranean in the Bronze and Iron Ages through engaged, collective, and people-centered ways of researching and sharing history. Their research engages with collective memory, ecology, decolonial and queer studies, heritage, and contemporary art. Leopoldo is currently also part of the Turkmen-Karahöyük Archaeological Project (Turkey), a scientific committee member for the Festival dei Matti in Venice (Italy), and an occasional collaborator with the David Graeber Institute. They have previously studied in Venice, Leiden, and Jerusalem; have taken part in archaeological projects in Turkey, Italy, Israel-Palestine, Iraq, and Czechia; and have run multiple workshops and collective performances in New York, Italy, and Turkey.
This workshop is offered in conjunction with ISAW's exhibition Cursed! The Power of Magic in the Ancient World. The exhibition is organized by the Toledo Museum of Art; its presentation at ISAW is made possible by generous support from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation and the Leon Levy Foundation.
Please check isaw.nyu.edu for event updates.
Abstract forthcoming
Please note: In order to enter Columbia's campus, you will need either a valid CUID or a guest access QR code. To receive guest access, please email José Romero (jmr2337@columbia.edu)
This talk examines one of the most disturbing images through which Ovid articulates his claustrophobic suffering in exile: the bronze bull in which the Sicilian tyrant Phalaris roasted his victims, including the bull's creator Perillus (Tristia 3.11). As they died, their cries of pain emerged from the bull's mouth so that the animal, hideously lifelike, appeared to moo. The poem is highly self-referential about art's ability to elicit wonder, to deceive, and to transmit the visceral realities of pain through unsettling acts of mimesis. Moreover, I argue that Ovid's bull is actually a hybrid beast whose mimetic power is politically charged. Ovid's elegy contains a series of allusions to another renowned bovine, with which Perillus' bull was often twinned in ancient art criticism: the famously lifelike classical Greek statue of a cow by Myron, which had been looted from Athens to furnish the portico of Augustus' temple of Apollo on the Palatine. Keeping the Augustan poetics and politics of Greek statuary in mind shows Ovid not only inserting his exile persona into myth, but also crafting his voice as a haunting, disruptive force for Augustus' aesthetic agenda.
Please note: In order to enter Columbia's campus, you will need either a valid CUID or a guest access QR code. To receive guest access, please email José Romero (jmr2337@columbia.edu)
Speaker: Dr. Bronwen Wickkiser
Solomon Bluhm Professor of Ancient History, Hunter College
Professor, CUNY Graduate Center
Please RSVP here.
Recovery: A Greek Healing Sanctuary and its Receptions
One of the most popular gods in ancient Greece was Asklepios, whose mega-sanctuary at Epidauros drew visitors from around the Mediterranean for healing. I’ll take you there virtually to explore how Asklepios, a deified doctor, operated and how his healing compares to that of mortal physicians of the time. We’ll also look at ways that this god and his sanctuary at Epidauros continue to exert their therapeutic influence to this day.
Please see (and distribute!) our flyer here.
The Dalton School’s Classical Languages Department is pleased to invite you and your students to its inaugural Classics Colloquium Lecture. There is no cost for this event, but we ask that you register online.
The lecture will be followed by a reception in the lobby, offering attendees an opportunity to continue the discussion with Professor Moss and fellow members of the classical studies community.
Classics students at every level (MS, HS, undergraduate, graduate, etc.), high school teachers, university faculty, and others with an interest in Classics are welcome to attend.
Please feel free to share this invitation (poster linked) with colleagues, students, and anyone else who may be interested.
Lecture Abstract:
When we imagine the great works of ancient Rome, we often picture famous authors like Cicero, Caesar, or Virgil writing alone. In reality, ancient texts were produced through the labor of many unseen workers. Enslaved secretaries took dictation, copyists reproduced manuscripts, and educated assistants who read texts aloud. Drawing on the multiple-award-winning book God’s Ghostwriters, this talk explores the hidden workforce behind Roman literature and shows how the writings attributed to celebrated authors were often the product of collaborative systems of labor. By looking at how texts were actually produced, we gain a new perspective on the making of classical literature and the many invisible hands that helped create it.
The annual lecture will be given by:
The CUNY Graduate Center
Professor and Executive Officer, Liberal Studies
Professor, Anthropology, Classics, Digital Humanities, Middle Eastern Studies, Public Scholarship
Beyond the White City: Fantasy, Power and Ancient Architecture at America’s World’s Fairs, 1893–1915
Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 celebrated the quadricentennial of Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas by creating a fantastical White City composed of Roman triumphal arches and domes, Corinthian colonnades, and Egyptian obelisks. World’s fairs were among the most important phenomena of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: millions visited and came away understanding the modernity and progress of these cities and the nascent superpower of the United States. But what they found was often a representation of the past. Ancient Greco-Roman and Egyptian architecture was deployed to create immersive environments at fairs held in Chicago, Nashville, Omaha, St. Louis, and San Francisco between 1893 and 1915. The seemingly endless adaptations of ancient architecture at these five fairs demonstrated that ancient architecture could symbolize and transmit the complex – and often paradoxical or contradictory – ideas that defined the United States at the turn of the twentieth century and still endure today. This talk will examine how ancient architecture was a powerful means for expressing the modernity of the United States by considering specific buildings from each of these fairs.
FORTHCOMING PUBLICATION:
Ancient Fantasies and Modern Power
Neo-Antique Architecture at American World's Fairs, 1893–1915
Our annual Spring lecture is the time when we conclude the year with a lecture, awarding of spring contest prizes and elections for the next year.
Thursday, May 7th, 5:00pm-7:00pm
Hemmerdinger Screening Room 706
Hunter College (68th and Lex.), East Building
Please bring a photo ID and enter through the main lobby of Hunter West at the SW corner of 68th and Lex. See the poster below and attached for further details.
Prof. Baraz has kindly shared the following abstract:
This talk proposes a set of connections through the disparate parts of Catullus’ corpus by focusing on the role of pietas, a concept central to Roman identity, which governs relationships between family members in accordance with a divine mandate. From abuse directed at false friends, to a hoped for quasi-marriage with his beloved, to grief at the loss of his brother, pietas provides a surprising foundation for building a poetics of shared concerns.
Poster shows two men sitting on stone seats, one holds a book and stylus. Two other men standing face them.
When Lucius, in the final book of the Metamorphoses, prays to an unknown lunar goddess and receives a reply from Isis, Apuleius has his characters, one human and one divine, address each another in Latin literary versions of Greek genres of discourse, including well-known hymns and self-revelations of Isis. Apuleius was not simply adapting Greek texts to his literary purposes; he was also representing existing dialogical relations between a range of Greek inscriptions, and – crucially – the spoken utterances for which they stood. Several of these inscribed discourses adopt and adapt stylistic and formal features from each other that were regarded as characteristic of Isiac genres of discourse. Drawing on examples from the Memphite self-revelation of Isis, adaptations from Maroneia and Andros, as well as the hymns of Isidorus from Medinet Madi, this talk explores the dialogical discourse of Greek hymnic texts belonging to Isis and her circle and their literary representation by Apuleius. While such texts have long been understood as domesticating translations of an exotic divinity intended to facilitate her assimilation into Hellenistic and Roman societies, examining them collectively and in their dialogical relations with one another shows that their discourse held a place for difference, figuring Isis as a stranger who was neither fully assimilated nor wholly other.
For a Zoom link, email Paraskevi Martzavou at pm2839@columbia.edu
PLEASE NOTE: To attend in person, non-Columbia students/staff will need to contact Columbia ahead of time to be put on a list for entry.
Can you rhapsodize like Homer or orate like Cicero? Come and compete against other Greek and Latin enthusiasts and win these prizes:
Prizes for the Oral Reading of Greek: 1st: $300; 2nd: $200; 3rd: $100.
Prizes for the Oral Reading of Latin: 1st: $300; 2nd: $200; 3rd: $100.
Any college or university student is eligible to compete. Contestants may compete for both the Greek and Latin prizes, or for either one. Memorization is not required; feel free to read from a script.
Choose one of the following passages:
Greek: Plato, Symposium 189d5 (δεῖ δε ...) to 190a4 (... ἐικάσειεν) OR Euripides, Medea 230-43
Latin: Sallust, Bellum Catilinae 52.2 (l onge alia ...) to12 (... perditum eant ) OR Horace, Odes 1.9
Registration Deadline is 18 April, 2026. Please email Prof. Katharina Volk to register.
The New York Classical Club undergraduate Greek and Latin translation examinations will be held Friday April 24, 2026, between 1:30pm and 5:00 p.m.at the Lincoln Center Campus of Fordham University, 113 West 60th Street, New York, NY 10023, Lowenstein Building Rm. 904. The Greek exam will be given from 1:30 to 3:00 p.m.; the Latin from 3:15 to 4:45 p.m.
1:30-3pm: Greek exam
3:15-4:45pm: Latin exam
Each examination will consist of one prose and one poetry passage appropriate for undergraduates. Tragedy and Attic prose are often given in the Greek exam; Cicero and Virgil are typical authors for the Latin exam.
REQUIREMENTS: A minimum of 2 years of college Greek and/or Latin (including the current semester) or the equivalent. The awards are not restricted to Classics majors and are open to all current undergraduates whether or not they are members of the New York Classical Club. Students may compete in one or both languages, and those who have participated in the past are welcome to do so again.
APPLICATIONS: Instructors should write a brief letter or email message nominating students and send it to me at the address below. The letter should state that the applicant is a bona-fide student this term and indicate which of the exams the student wishes to take. Students should also send a letter directly to Matthew McGowan.
DEADLINE: All faculty nominations and student applications should be received by Wednesday April 22nd.
PRIZES: Cash prizes of $300, $200, and $100 will be awarded to the winners in each exam. Winners and their instructors will be notified very soon after the exam. The prizes will be awarded at the Club's spring meeting on Friday, May 8th at the CUNY Graduate Center. The Club at its discretion reserves the right to award fewer than three prizes for each examination.
Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus is easily reached by subway. Closest subway stops are 59th St. / Columbus Circle (1/A/B/C/D) and 57th St. & 7th Avenue (N/Q/R/W).
The entrance to 113 West 60th Street is on Columbus Avenue.
Ask the guard to direct you to the elevators on Lowenstein’s Plaza Level to reach the 9th floor and room 904.
For more information contact: Matthew McGowan
See flyer here: Undergraduate Translation Exam 2026
From the palaces of Knossos to the Rock of Gibraltar and beyond, the Mediterranean Sea dominated the world around it, shaping the societies that developed upon its shores. The earliest legends, the tales of the Trojan War and its aftermath, begin with a woman whose face launched a thousand ships, and end with the ten-year odyssey of a man whose story continues to resonate today, as this summer’s highly-anticipated Christopher Nolan blockbuster demonstrates. But what truly lies at the heart of the ancient sea?
Please see their website for updated information.
The New York Classical Club invites you to send your students to this year’s Latin Sight Translation Contest for High School Students and to the second High School Latin Recitation/Reading Contest.
The translation contest will take place from 12:00-1:30, and the recitation/reading contest will follow from 2:00-4:00. There will be some light refreshments available from 1:30-2:00. Monetary prizes will be awarded to the top three elocutionists in prose and poetry and to the top three translators in each of the five divisions of the competition.
The different levels for this competition are:
Caesar – Division I Cicero – Division II Ovid – Division III
Vergil – Division IV Horace – Division V
Please note that all divisions will have appropriate vocabulary help, which we hope will encourage students to participate.
For the recitation/reading contest, students may choose to compete in either prose or poetry. Students may notcompete in both categories. There will be separate prizes for prose and poetry this year. For Latin Prose, the passage is Seneca the Elder's Controversiae, 1.1-4 and, for Latin Poetry, the passage is Virgil's Aeneid, 4.305-330. Link to passages here. Please note that students are not required to memorize the passages and are able to read from a script. If you have students participating in the recitation/reading contest, we ask that you fill out this form by Friday, April 3rd.
If you are sending students to the translation contest, please fill out this registration form by Friday, April 3rd. We ask that you limit your registration to three students per level (thus, a maximum of 15 students per school).
If you are bringing students, please volunteer to stay and proctor one of the contests; this year's event promises to be full of memorable moments, and we would so appreciate your presence and help.
Corpora Foedata: Bodily Taboo and Corruption in Antiquity
Detailed schedule TBA. See website in the meantime.
What constituted ancient logics of corruption and pollution? Ancient medicine speaks to the curative effects of ‘purification’ (katharsis), the body’s release of corrupting pestilence or imbalance. Mindful of the history of the 20th century, which saw the application of Germ-theory to disastrous ideologies of ethnic purity, we are sensitive to thoughtscapes which relate notions of the body’s corruption to that of the community. The analogy of body to community and of community to body was, indeed, not uncommon in antiquity. What then were the notional processes by which familial, civic, religious, or ’social bodies’ became corrupted? Ancient discourses testify certain behaviors which are uniquely ‘polluting’ or ‘corrupting’: incest, cannibalism, homicide, among others. How are these violations of the flesh presented in the literary and material records? More abstractly, within the full spectrum of ancient discourse, where are the places, times, or moments where corruption and taboo are normatively defined? How, moreover, was the discourse of corruption caught between asymmetries of socio-political power and traditional modes of defining or questioning social values?
A quarter-century ago, Horden and Purcell’s Corrupting Sea provided a new ecological model of the ancient economy. The Mediterranean was a unique geography which maximized, as it were, the constant ‘corruption’ of communities through their necessitated yet ever-complicated relationship with the sea. Communities were built on exchange, meixis, the very expectation of ‘corruption,’ and indeed its need for positive integration. What therefore made sense of the world’s seemingly constant corruption of the community or perhaps of the oikoumēnē itself as a constantly self-corrupting body? We remember the descriptions of socially subversive Bacchic ritual, related to us by Euripides and Livy, but communities also institutionalized and welcomed both Dionysus and many other new gods, a complex phenomenon central to the study of religious change. Initiatory religion, through such components as aischrologia, adapted contexts for licensed obscenity, otherwise corruptive speech ritually made acceptable. We are therefore moved to juxtapose different models of transformation–personal, ritual, and communal–, their bearing on the language of ‘corruption,’ and their practiced and discursive traits.
Registration is required at the following link: https://forms.gle/mGKBLu3X9hxaz8Qr7
For more information, contact the conference organizers at: nyuclassicsgraduateconference@gmail.com
This conference is generously sponsored by the NYU Department of Classics, Center for Ancient Studies, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, Italian Studies, Medieval and Renaissance Center, Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, and the New York Classical Club.
What role can Latin play in general education, i.e. in teaching that is not aimed at future specialists? At a time when there is a sort of renewed interest in Latin in Europe, an educational project involving five European countries offers an interesting perspective. For a long time, Latin was assigned metalinguistic tasks (description of morphological and syntactic linguistic functions) that are now carried out through the learning of spoken foreign languages and the teaching of linguistics. Latin now has a clear historical function, enabling a direct relationship with the texts of European culture from antiquity to the dawn of Romanticism. This gives rise to a vision of Latin teaching that is not limited to antiquity, but extends to the Medieval, Renaissance and early modern worlds. In this context, learning vocabulary and consolidating core vocabulary is central, so that texts can be read directly without immediately aiming for translation but rather for comprehension of the text through the assimilation of sufficient core vocabulary. The Eulalia -- In-Eulalia project, developed over several years in Europe, aims to achieve uniformity in Latin learning levels across the continent by proposing clear levels of linguistic competence and developing teaching tools that enable an efficient approach to the study of Latin and effective educational and cultural exchange between European nations in order to recognise themselves in the common culture that unites them.
In person at the CUNY Graduate Center, Room 4422
OR
Via Zoom— email RKousser@gc.cuny.edu for the link
NOTE that you will need a valid ID to enter the Columbia campus.
If you need guest access, please email Katharina Volk at kv2018@columbia.edu.
Ronald Knox (1888–1957) was one of the most brilliant of a brilliant generation of English classicists. He was also a member of the English generation that was shattered by World War I. As his friends were fighting and dying in France, Knox himself took a leave of absence from his fellowship at an empty Oxford and spent 1915–1916 teaching Classics at Shrewsbury School. In my presentation, I’ll reconstruct Knox’s revolutionary teaching at Shrewsbury and the role that Classics played in giving his life meaning and purpose during the war years. Knox’s approach to the classroom and to Classics still has much to teach us: about Edwardian classical education and classical reception, about pedagogy, and maybe even about life.
The NYU Department of Classics in conjunction with the Center for Ancient Studies announces
Reception to follow.
This event will take place in-person only. It is free and open to the public, but advance registration is required. A valid government-issued photo ID is required for building entry.
For more information, contact the Department of Classics at 212.998.8597 or as-classics-department@nyu.edu
There is a consensus in modern scholarship that Cassius Dio favoured a form of government where the senatorial class was an integrated part of both the decision-making process and the administration of the empire. In this paper, I question that assumption. Most scholars have focused on the fictitious dialogue between Augustus’ companions Agrippa and Maecenas, and the few passages where Dio compares Republican and monarchical rule. In contrast, I include Dio’s entire narrative to see how monarchical and Republican rule performed historically across the millennium the historian covers in what is left of the eighty books he composed. In the paper I offer snapshots from regal Rome, the age of the Republic, and Imperial Rome, focusing on the reign of Augustus and Dio’s own lifetime when he was a devoted member of the imperial administration. I explore whether Dio believed Republican rule was ever a reliable alternative to monarchical rule. Furthermore, I ask what in Dio’s eyes constituted the best form of monarchical rule and whether the senatorial class was ever—historically or in Dio’s own experience—a reliable social group either at the time they were ruling Rome or as partners of the emperor. Across the paper I compare Dio’s views and his approach to Roman politics with the parallel sources.
IN PERSON: CUNY Graduate Center, Room 4422
ZOOM: email rkousser@gc.cuny.edu for the link
Speaker: Dr. Samuel Holzman
Assistant Professor of Art and Archaeology
Stanley J. Seeger '52 Center for Hellenic Studies
Director, Program in Archaeology
The Colors of Ancient Greek Architecture
Color was an integral feature of ancient Greek temples. Although these hues have largely faded, ample evidence survives, from trace amounts of pigments still in situ to inscribed receipts for the workers who carried paint pots up scaffolding. This talk looks closely at the relationship between color and shadow design, focusing on how ancient architects complemented carved designs with painted details and sought to balance interiors and exteriors.
Please see (and distribute!) our flyer here.
by Dr. Rachel Kousser, Professor and Executive Officer, Program in Classics, CUNY Graduate Center
Alexander the Great lived over 2,300 years ago, but he still fascinates us. This talk examines his storied greatness, drawing on exciting new research and integrating diverse perspectives to show this larger-than-life figure as never before. It asks, in an age of ambitious, competitive, and brutally effective political leaders, what made him stand out? How can we reconstruct the untold stories of the people who made him what he was? And what makes this long-dead historical figure relevant for today’s world? What can we learn from his “successes,” but also his failures and mistakes? I offer a behind-the-scenes look at my research process, key discoveries, and writing journey — which, like Alexander’s, was not a heroic solo endeavor but instead a group effort, and particularly a partnership.
Our annual Spring lecture is the time when we conclude the year with a lecture, awarding of spring contest prizes and elections for the next year.
The New York Classical Club invites you to send your students to this year’s Latin Sight Translation Contest for High School Students and to the second High School Latin Recitation/Reading Contest.
This year’s competitions will be held on Saturday, April 26th from 12:00 PM - 4:00 PM at The Nightingale-Bamford School (20 East 92nd St., between Madison and 5th Ave.) in Manhattan. The translation contest will take place from 12:00-1:30, and the recitation/reading contest will follow from 2:00-4:00. There will be some light refreshments available from 1:30-2:00. Monetary prizes will be awarded to the top three elocutionists in prose and poetry and to the top three translators in each of the five divisions of the competition.
If you are sending students to the translation contest, please fill out this registration form by Friday, April 18th. We ask that you limit your registration to three students per level (thus, a maximum of 15 students per school).
The different levels for this competition are:
Caesar – Division I Cicero – Division II Ovid – Division III
Vergil – Division IV Horace – Division V
Please note that all divisions will have appropriate vocabulary help, which we hope will encourage students to participate.
For the recitation/reading contest, students may choose from the following passages, for Latin Prose, Cicero's In Catilinam 1.7 and for Latin Poetry, Ovid's Metamorphoses 3.660-689. You can find the passages for the recitation/reading contest at the end of this email. Please note that students are not required to memorize the passages and are able to read from a script. If you have students participating in the recitation/reading contest, we ask that you fill out this form by Friday, April 18th.
If you are bringing students, please volunteer to stay and proctor one of the contests; this year's event promises to be full of memorable moments, and we would so appreciate your presence and help.
Thank you, and we look forward to seeing you and your students at the Latin Sight Translation Contest for High School Students and the inaugural High School Latin Recitation/Reading Contest on Saturday, April 13th at 12:00.
Latin & Greek Recitation Contest 2025
Can you rhapsodize like Homer or orate like Cicero? Come and compete against other Greek and Latin enthusiasts and win these prizes:
Prizes for the Oral Reading of Greek: 1st: $300; 2nd: $200; 3rd: $100.
Prizes for the Oral Reading of Latin: 1st: $300; 2nd: $200; 3rd: $100.
Any college or university student is eligible to compete. Contestants may compete for both the Greek and Latin prizes, or for either one. Memorization is not required; feel free to read from a script.
Choose one of the following passages:
Greek: Plato, Apology 41c7 (Ἀλλὰ κα]ὶ ...) to d9 (... μέμφεσθαι) OR Homer, Iliad 406-420
Latin: Cicero, First Catilinarian 32-33 OR Catullus 3.
Registration Deadline is 29 March, 2025. Please email Prof. Katharina Volk to register.
The New York Classical Club is proud to present a lecture for high school students on the epic tradition, focusing on The Odyssey and The Aeneid. The speaker will be Jeffrey Ulrich, Professor of Classics at Rutgers University. Following the lecture, there will be time for Q&A with Professor Ulrich. Light refreshments will be served.
This conference is for high school students in the New York City Metro area. Please email Louis Cohen to RSVP. We want an accurate account of attendees to plan for seating and refreshments. Teachers are encouraged to attend.
