Swansea Ancient World Seminars: A New Semester
A new teaching block has started, and with it a new online seminar series on Mondays at 5pm UK time (daylight saving time means a change from Greenwich Mean Time to British Summer Time on 28 March; can you tell Ian Goh, our seminar coordinator, has been teaching Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Fasti, which are both about the nature of time?). The first of these talks, featuring Dr Jackie Murray, an Associate Professor at the University of Kentucky, occurred yesterday and was a huge success, a lucid discussion that drew Erinna’s Distaff, Callimachus’ Hymn to Demeter, and Herodas Mimiamb 6 together with Sex and the City and the Bechdel test.
Our themes for the seminar this semester are ‘Relevant Classics’, as last year, and ‘Hinterlands’. Specifically, a number of these talks (Cobb, Cooper, Naeser, Harrison, Papantoniou) have been organised by Dr Ersin Hussein and Dr Christian Knoblauch, who lead our research group OLCAP, under the more precise banner, ‘Marginal Views: New Research on Disciplinary Hinterlands’.
To attend the seminar and obtain the Zoom links, please sign up to the mailing list by sending an email to ancientworldswanseaseminar@gmail.com.
Here’s the remainder of the programme:
February 8 – Matthew Cobb (University of Wales Trinity St David): ‘The Port of Berenike and the Red Sea Trade in Late Antiquity’
February 15 – Pramit Chaudhuri (University of Texas at Austin) and Joseph Dexter (Harvard University): ‘Some Limit Cases in the Relevance of Classics: Computation, Culture, and COVID’
February 22 – Julien Cooper (United International College Zhuhai): ‘Desert Politics: State Formation in the Egyptian Eastern Desert and the “Rise of the Blemmyes”’
TUESDAY 6:00 P.M. March 2 – Claudia Naeser (University College London): ‘Centring the Periphery—Making Sense of the Archaeology of Mograt Island, Sudan’
March 8 – Dan-el Padilla Peralta (Princeton University): ‘Dreams from our Fathers: The Classicisms of Kehinde Wiley’
March 15 – Joy Connolly (American Council of Learned Societies): ‘What Do Scholars Owe to the Public?’
March 22 – Stephen Harrison (Swansea University): ‘Resistance and Collaboration at the Waning of the Achaemenid Empire’
EASTER
April 19 – Giorgos Papantoniou (Trinity College Dublin): ‘Visual and Material Culture from Classical to Hellenistic Cyprus’
April 26 – Lawrence Kim (Trinity University): Title TBA
May 3 – Leanna Boychenko (Loyola University Chicago): ‘Medea vs. Talos and Seth vs. Apophis: Egyptian Influence on Apollonius’ Argonautica’
