Topic varies from semester to semester. For the Fall 2021 semester, the topic will be: Eco-critical Approaches to Roman Ideas of Landscape. In the Roman period, landscape was singled out as a theme for the first time in Greco-Roman visual culture. Writers described it accurately in texts and treatises, its qualities were praised and sought out in everyday life, and images of the natural world permeated the public and private spheres. This attention to landscape found an architectural expression in Roman luxury villas. It is primarily in the luxurious country-house residences that ideas about landscape were fully explored and shaped. In designing for luxury, Romans engaged in a sophisticated interplay of architecture and landscape - an interplay that Renaissance architects discovered and reinvented, and which persists to this day. This course will analyze the architectural design and wall-painting decoration of Roman villas, the cultivated landscapes around them, and their literary representations in order to address the ways in which ideas about and the idealization of landscape contributed to the creation of a novel language of architecture and landscape architecture. And while Roman luxury villa architecture and decoration showcase sophisticated ideas about landscape, they silenced and beautified the dependence of their surrounding cultivated landscapes and agricultural estates on enslaved labor. Moving beyond post-Renaissance ideas of landscape and canonical considerations of Roman wall-painting, the course will adopt an eco-critical lens to shed light on the ideas and idealization of landscape that were shaped in this period. It will draw on a diverse body of evidence (archaeological, art historical, and literary) in order to prioritize perceptions of ecology, environment and human-nature relationships and uncover a broader relationship between architecture, landscape architecture and design.

Traditionally, archaeological research has focused on the "site" or "sites." Regional investigation tends to stress settlement pattern and settlement system determined through archaeological site survey. This seminar will stress the space between the sites or "points" on the landscape. Most previous attempts at "landscape archaeology" tended to focus on the relationship of sites and the natural environment. This course will highlight the cultural, "anthropogenic," or "built environment"--in this case human modification and transformation of the natural landscape in the form of pathways, roads, causeways, monuments, walls, agricultural fields and their boundaries, gardens, astronomical and calendrical alignments, and water distribution networks. Features will be examined in terms of the "social logic" or formal patterning of cultural space. These can provide insights into indigenous structures such as measurement systems, land tenure, social organization, engineering, cosmology, calendars, astronomy, cognition, and ritual practices. Landscapes are also the medium for understanding everyday life, experience, movement, memory, identity, time, and historical ecology. Ethnographic, ethnohistorical, and archaeological case studies will be investigated from both the Old and New Worlds.

Designed to prepare graduates in any aspect of study in the ancient world to prepare for the dissertation prospectus. Course will be centered around individual presentations and group critique of prospectus' in process, as well the fundamentals of large-project research design and presentation.

This course offers a wide-ranging introduction to the art, architecture, and material culture of Byzantium--a Christian, predominantly Greek-speaking civilization that flourished in the Eastern Mediterranean for over a thousand years. Positioned between the Muslim East and the Latin West, Antiquity and the Early Modern era, Byzantium nurtured a vibrant and highly sophisticated artistic culture. With emphasis placed upon paradigmatic objects and monuments, we will examine an array of artistic media, from mosaic and panel painting to metalwork, ivory carving, book illumination, and embroidery. We will consider the making, consumption, and reception of Byzantine art in a variety of contexts: political, devotional, ritual, and domestic. Topics include the idea of empire and its visual articulation; court culture; the veneration of images and relics; patronage, piety, and self-representation; authorship and artistic agency; materiality and the sensory experience of art; the reception of the pagan Greco-Roman past; and the changing nature of Byzantium's interactions with neighboring cultures.

This course surveys Greek art and artifacts from Sicily to the Black Sea from the 10th century BCE to the 2nd century BCE, including the age of Alexander and the Hellenistic Kingdoms. Public sculpture and painting on and around grand buildings and gardens, domestic luxury arts of jewelry, cups and vases, mosaic floors, and cult artefacts are discussed. Also considered are the ways in which heroic epic, religious and political themes are used to engaged viewers' emotions and served both domestic and the public aims. We discuss the relationships of images and things to space and structure, along with ideas of invention and progress, and the role of monuments, makers and patrons in Greek society.

The Mediterranean environment is both diverse and unique, and nurtured numerous complex societies along its shores in antiquity. This seminar offers a primer on theoretical and methodological approaches to studying landscapes and seascapes of the Mediterranean from the Bronze Age to the early modern era, at scales from local to international and on land and underwater. Concepts from processual, post-processual, and current archaeologies will be considered, and field techniques including excavation and surface survey, remote sensing and geophysics, GIS modeling, and ethnography/ethnoarchaeology are examined. Course content and discussion focus on case studies that illustrate how these tools are used to reconstruct the appearance and resources of the natural environment; overland and maritime routes; settlement location, size, function, and demography; social and economic networks; and agricultural, pastoral, and nomadic lifeways. Seminar participants will develop case studies of their own geographical and chronological interest.

The textual and physical remains of Greek and Roman culture and belief as 'myth' entranced the post-antique European world and its neighbors. Makers, patrons and viewers manipulated those survivals to challenge and speak to a contemporary world. This course focuses on how and why artists and their patrons engaged the mythic and examines the various areas of political and religious life that sought animation through an evocation of narratives from the past. Readings and case studies will engage with very late antique, medieval, and early modern art, turning to the modern and contemporary as well. Moving to the modern lets us examine, among other things, how artists address the exclusionary histories of the past, to enable critiques of myths of supremacy by one gender, race, or culture over others.

This course addresses the various areas and approaches to "otherness" in ancient Mediterranean archaeology, and the power dynamics of oppression. We'll not only examine disempowerment around cultural identity, class, gender and sexuality, and race/ethnicity, but we'll spend equal time pondering how those subjects have been studied - or ignored - by classical archaeologists. The power relationships both inherent in the subjugation of various kinds of people in the ancient world, and in the academic discourses around them, are the themes of the course. While this course will be focused on the Bronze Age through late antique Mediterranean, those with other period/interests are most welcome. Students will be asked to bring their own interests to the course, which help shape the course. Upper-level courses in archaeology, anthropology, or ancient history are recommended prior to enrollment.

This course will explore some of the pressing and problematic scholarly debates in the historiography of the Roman imperial period, from the accession of the first emperor, Augustus, to the reign of Justinian (ruled 527-363 CE). Students will gain a familiarity with both the broad historical narratives of the Roman empire and the details of specific scholarly disagreements in the intellectual, political, socio-economic, and cultural history of the period.