Tags: Guest speaker

A.E. Stallings is an American poet who studied Classics at the University of Georgia and Oxford. In October 2023, she began her four-year elected term as Oxford Professor of Poetry, one of the world’s most prestigious academic honors in the field of poetry.

This event is presented by the Department of Classics, the Felson Classics Endowment, the Willson Center, the Jere W. Morehead Honors College, the UGA at Oxford Program, the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, and by the UGA Humanities Council as the opening keynote event of the UGA Humanities Festival. It is also part of the Willson Center's Global Georgia public event series and the Spring 2024 UGA Signature Lecture Series.

Link to Article

Join us for the 8th Annual Undergraduate Conference on March 16th from 9am-4pm.

Keynote Speaker Dr. Jennifer Gates-Foster at 2:30 PM

"Philological and Archaeological Inquiry in the Classical Near East"

Jennifer Stager specializes in the art and architecture of the ancient Mediterranean and its afterlives. Her areas of focus include theories of color and materiality, feminisms, multilingualism and cultural exchange, disability studies, ancient Greek and Roman medicine, performance, and classical receptions.

"Over the past few centuries, people have continuously (re)discovered the many colors of and on ancient Greek and Roman art and architecture and notions of the classical built from it. In contrast to modernity’s relentless rediscovery, colors—of materials, bodies, and nature—were once a quotidian part of antiquity. Ancient Greek philosophers sought to understand color’s ubiquity as a phenomenon indexing the visible world. At the same time, ancient artists built up all manner of objects from material colors sourced from the earth and manipulated in their workshops. Healers carefully observed the body’s changing colors to diagnose illness and worked with the earth’s material colors—with pharmaka—to restore health. Such engagement with material colors also engaged connected supply-chains and the laborers working to extract, move, and prepare them. In his analysis of Plato’s Phaedrus, Jacques Derrida foregrounds the notion of the pharmakon as both medication and poison, but reducible to neither. Building from this multiplicity, this talk considers pharmaka as both pigments and drugs to analyze the intersections of polychromy, philosophy, and medicine."

"Speaking with (Digital) Maps About Roman Amphitheaters"

Keynote Speaker Dr. Sebastian Heath at 2:30 PM

The visual and material culture of the Roman Empire provides an abundant record of encounters with or simply imaginings of foreign peoples. These images render visible complex formulations of ethnicity, social hierarchies, and power.

This lecture surveys the ways in which imperial artists represented the peoples whom the Romans referred to as Aethiopians or Nubians (i.e., “Black” Africans) in a variety of visual media. The lecture also considers how and why these works have been (mis)interpreted or sometimes altogether ignored by ancient art historians, and proposes new ways of integrating them into future, critical histories of Roman art.

Abstract:

Studies of the ancient Greek world have typically focused on the life histories of elite males as they have made the most distinct mark on ancient Greek literature, art, and material culture. As a result, the voices of non-Greeks, the physically impaired, the impoverished, and the generally disenfranchised have been silent, which has substantially complicated the creation of a historical narrative of these marginalized groups.

In order to reconstruct societal attitudes toward marginalized peoples, my broader project considers the skeletal remains and burial contexts of the individuals themselves and interprets them within the context of contemporary literary, visual, and material evidence. Using this approach, new light is shed on groups of individuals who were typically relegated to the periphery of Greek society in the Late Archaic and Classical periods. 

Bio:

Carrie L. Sulosky Weaver is a Mediterranean archaeologist and a Teaching Adjunct Professor in Classics (research affiliate) at the University of Pittsburgh. Her area of specialization is the art, architecture, and archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean world, with an emphasis on funerary art and architecture, burial practices, and the analysis of human bone. She has excavated in Pompeii and Sicily, and analyzed human remains from Rome, Sicily, Turkey, and the UK. Carrie is the author of The Bioarchaeology of Classical Kamarina: Life and Death in Greek Sicily (University Press of Florida, 2015) and Marginalised Populations in the Ancient Greek World: The Bioarchaeology of the Other (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), and the co-editor of The Ancient Art of Transformation: Case Studies from Mediterranean Contexts (Oxbow Books, 2019).

"The ancient Roman emperor Nero often figures today as a stock embodiment of an abominable ruler. In the late Middle Ages, Nero also was deplored, but for crimes long forgotten in modern accounts. This lecture explores a story about unusual demands Nero made on a cluster of doctors, presented in word and image in a pair of illuminated World Chronicle manuscripts created in Bavaria, circa 1400. The original audiences for the tale lived at a time of increased professionalization and regulation of medicine, when public health was understood to be a means toward urban peace more broadly. The Nero episodes in the World Chronicles invited readerviewers to reflect on harmony in the public sphere by engaging with entertaining scenes of Nero’s corporeal eccentricity."

Craig Williams
Classics Department
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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Jeremy Roberts [Lead for Athens Middle East Orchestra, UGA Alum, and Public Defender for Athens-Clarke County]

A Performance of Oud Music from Syria, Turkey, Egypt, and Palestine



Event hosted in conjunction with Prof Jordan Pickett's CLAS4300 Archaeology of the Near East: From Alexander to Islam

With the support of the Department of Classics and Franklin College

"Color into the Equation: Classical Greek sculpture in a New Light"

Jan Stubbe Østergaard: Willson Center for Humanities and Arts Distinguished Lecturer

Emeritus Research Curator

Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen

February 24, 2021 12:30 - 1:40 pm

Location

Virtual Zoom

https://art.uga.edu/events/jan-stubbe-ostergaard-willson-center-humanities-and-arts-distinguished-lecturer

Preregistration required. Register in advance for this meeting: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUpdO2urD0sE9dWAdJF8We7lrjgs6Ve9wSC