Department website: http://classics.jhu.edu
Classics has long been at the heart of humanistic studies at Johns Hopkins University: the very first person appointed to the faculty of the newly founded University in 1876 was Basil L. Gildersleeve, a professor of Greek. The university adopted the most effective model of scholarship at the time-the German seminar, which combined teaching with research as the basis for training students at Johns Hopkins. This revolutionary structure was central to the new model of the "research university" that Johns Hopkins University pioneered.
Today, the Department of Classics at Johns Hopkins University seeks to maintain and enhance this tradition of leadership and innovation. Members of the current faculty are highly interdisciplinary. We combine philological historical, iconographical, and comparative methods in our investigations of the cultures, broadly conceived, of ancient Greece and Rome, with additional expertise in Reception Studies (aka "The Classical Tradition") and in the post-classical use of Greek and Latin.
The undergraduate and graduate programs reflect these characteristics. They are founded upon intensive study of ancient Greek and Latin language and literature, but also require rigorous work in such fields as ancient history, art, archaeology, and philosophy, while allowing considerable flexibility to accommodate individual interests. These programs aim to produce broad, versatile scholars who have a holistic view of ancient cultures and of the evidence by which those cultures are comprehended.
The Classics department enjoys close ties with several local and regional institutions whose missions include the study of the ancient world, including the Walters Art Museum, with its world-class collection of antiquities and manuscripts; the Baltimore Museum of Art, with its Roman mosaics; and the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C. Internationally, it is a member of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, the American Academy in Rome, and the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome.
The department's main scholarly resource is the Milton S. Eisenhower Library, which has broad and deep holdings in the various fields of classical antiquity. The department also has access to a significant collection of Greek, Roman, and Etruscan antiquities, housed in the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum, located alongside its own quarters in Gilman Hall.
Undergraduate Programs
The department offers undergraduate courses in Greek and Latin languages and literature, ancient history, classical art and archaeology, Greek and Roman civilizations, history of sexuality and gender, ancient philosophy, mythology, and classical reception. These courses are open to all students in the university, regardless of their academic year or major field of interest.
For current course information and registration go to https://sis.jhu.edu/classes/
Courses
This introductory course examines the history, society, and culture of the Roman state in the Imperial age (ca. 31 BCE-ca. 500 CE), during which it underwent a traumatic transition from an oligarchic to a monarchic form of government, attained its greatest territorial expanse, produced its most famous art, architecture, and literature, experienced vast cultural and religious changes, and finally was transformed into an entirely different ("late antique") form of society. All readings in English.
Area: Humanities
This introductory level course examines the history, society, and culture of the Roman state in the Republican period (509-31 BCE), during which it expanded from a small city-state to a Mediterranean empire. We also consider the Republic's importance for American revolutionaries in the 18th century. All readings in English.
Area: Humanities
This course provides a comprehensive, intensive introduction to the study of ancient Greek. During the first semester, the focus will be on morphology and vocabulary. Cannot be taken Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory.
Course provides comprehensive, intensive introduction to the study of ancient Greek. The first semester’s focus is morphology and vocabulary; the second semester’s emphasis is syntax and reading. Course may not be taken Satisfactory/ Unsatisfactory.
Prerequisite(s): AS.040.105
This course provides a comprehensive, intensive introduction to the study of Latin for new students, as well as a systematic review for those students with a background in Latin. Emphasis during the first semester will be on morphology and vocabulary. Course may not be taken Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory.
Course provides comprehensive, intensive introduction to the study of Latin for new students as well as systematic review for students with background in Latin. The first semester's emphasis is on morphology and vocabulary; the second semester's focus is on syntax and reading. Course may not be taken Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory.
Prerequisite(s): AS.040.107
The course will introduce students to major aspects of the ancient Greek civilization, with special emphasis placed upon culture, society, archaeology, literature, and philosophy.
Area: Humanities
Science Fiction has classically been considered a product – and even a hallmark – of the modern world. But this course opens up the world of ancient scientific fictions. From philosophical myth and utopia to the imaginary worlds of fantastical travelogues and novelistic adventures in outer space, these narratives take us deep into the scientific imagination of the ancient Greeks and Romans. We will examine how these invented worlds reflected critically and creatively on aspects of contemporary society, including political and cosmic structures; conflicts between religion and philosophy; death and the after-life; the body, sexuality and technology. We will also examine the influence these fictions had on lunar narratives of the (early) modern period, including Kepler’s Dream and Richard Adams Locke’s great lunar hoax of 1835.
Area: Humanities
This course focuses on major and often intricate myths and mythical patterns of thought as they are reflected in compelling ancient visual and textual narratives. Being one of the greatest treasure troves of the ancient world, these myths will further be considered in light of their rich reception in the medieval and modern world (including their reception in the modern fields of anthropology and philosophy).
Area: Humanities
Emphasis on ancient Greek ritual, music, religion, and society; and on cultural institutions such as symposia (drinking parties) and festivals.
Area: Humanities
This course aims to provide an in-depth exploration of Homer’s Odyssey (in translation). We will study the poem’s roots in a tradition of ancient oral poetry, gain a fuller understanding of how it was interpreted within different historical contexts, and examine the poem’s fascination with topics such as gender, class, tales of exploration and colonization, truth and lies and identity.
Area: Humanities
This seminar investigates the Eastern Mediterranean as a space of intense cultural interaction in the Late Bronze Age, exploring how people, ideas, and things not only came into contact but deeply influenced one another through maritime trade, art, politics, etc. In addition to class discussion, we will work hands-on with artifacts from the JHU Archaeological Museum, focusing on material from Cyprus.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course investigates the Greek and Latin roots of modern medical terminology, with additional focus on the history of ancient medicine and its role in the development of that terminology.
Area: Humanities
This course will examine the reception of the Classics in Japanese popular culture anime. We will view how characters, creatures, and beings from Greco-Roman myth are presented in anime, with special attention to concepts such as human beings, humanity, and divinity. Dean's Teaching Fellowship course.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Reading ability in classical Greek is developed through a study of various authors.
Prerequisite(s): AS.040.105 AND AS.040.106 or equivalent
Area: Humanities
Reading ability in classical Greek is developed through a study of various authors.
Prerequisite(s): AS.040.205
Area: Humanities
Although emphasis is still placed on development of rapid comprehension, readings and discussions introduce student to study of Latin literature, principally through texts of various authors.
Prerequisite(s): AS.040.107 AND AS.040.108 or equivalent
Area: Humanities
Reading ability in Latin is developed through the study of various authors, primarily Cicero (fall) and Vergil (spring).
Prerequisite(s): AS.040.207
Area: Humanities
This course explores the creation and role of early Aegean wall painting. Found primarily in palaces, villas and ritual spaces, these paintings interacted with architecture to create micro-worlds for social activities taking place in their midst. Their subjects range—from mythological to documentary, from ornamental to instructive. They depict dance and battle, fantastical beasts and daily life. We examine their complex relationship to lived reality as well as the activities that surrounded them, from their crafting, to performance of rituals, to their role in “international” relations.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course takes us on an exploratory journey through the ancient astronomical imaginary. We will focus on ancient Greek and Roman ideas about the structure of the cosmos, the substance and nature of the stars, the Earth’s place and role in the universe, ancient attempts to map the stars, and ancient beliefs about the significance of cosmic phenomena for events in the human world. The course will culminate in the extraordinary ancient tradition of lunar fictions, which are our earliest imaginative accounts of life on other worlds. Come join us for a voyage to the stars!
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Judaism and Hellenism have been traditionally opposed to one another: the Jewish calendar celebrates the triumph of the Maccabees against the Hellenizers at Hannukah, and mourns the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by the Romans on Tisha Be-Av. However, the relationship between the Jewish people and the Graeco-Roman world can hardly be reduced to a military confrontation. Did these apparently opposite worlds influence one another? How were the Jews viewed among the Greeks and the Romans and the many other ethnic groups living in the ancient Mediterranean, and how did they view Greek and Latin culture? What did they have to offer on the international, multilingual ‘cultural market’ of the Graeco-Roman world? Through a selection of ancient texts and modern scholarship, this course analyzes the vicissitudes of the Jewish people and of Judaism from the Hellenistic Age to the Late Antique, throughout the centuries in which Greeks, Romans and Jews found themselves living “under one roof”. All readings in English. Dean's Teaching Fellowship course.
Area: Humanities
Islands present highly distinctive contexts for social life. We examine three island worlds of the third and second millennia BCE through their archaeological remains, each with its particularities. These are places where water had a unique and powerful meaning, where boat travel was part of daily life, where palaces flourished and where contact with other societies implied voyages of great distance across the sea. Class combines close study of material culture and consideration of island-specific interpretive paradigms; students work with artifacts in the JHU Archaeological Museum.
Area: Humanities
Students will acquire more in-depth knowledge of Ancient Greek literature by reading and discussing its most important and famous texts, from the Iliad and the Odyssey to tragedy to philosophy. Knowledge of Greek is not required.
Prerequisite(s): AS.040.111 OR AS.040.121
Area: Humanities
In this course we will follow the fortunes of the ancient Greek and Roman novels.
Prerequisite(s): AS.040.103 OR AS.040.104 OR AS.040.111 OR AS.040.112 OR AS.040.121 OR AS.040.133 OR AS.040.245
Area: Humanities
This course introduces students to the significance of Greek theater in its original context and to masterpieces of Greek tragedy such as Medea, Oedipus the King, and The Bacchae. Readings will be in English. No Greek is required. Recommended Course Background: AS.040.111 Ancient Greek Civilization, AS.040.121 Ancient Greek Mythology, or some exposure to ancient Greek culture.
Area: Humanities
This course aims to increase proficiency and improve comprehension of the ancient Greek language. Intensive reading of ancient Greek texts, with attention to grammar, idiom, translation, etc. Reading of prose or verse authors, depending on the needs of students. Specific offerings vary. Co-listed with AS.040.705.
Prerequisite(s): AS.040.205 AND AS.040.206 or equivalent
Area: Humanities
This course aims to increase proficiency and improve comprehension of the ancient Greek language. Intensive reading of ancient Greek texts, with attention to grammar, idiom, translation, etc. Reading of prose or verse authors, depending on the needs of students. Specific offerings vary. Co-listed with AS.040.702.
Prerequisite(s): AS.040.205 AND AS.040.206 or equivalent
Area: Humanities
This course aims to increase proficiency and improve comprehension of the Latin language. Intensive reading of Latin texts, with attention to grammar, idiom, translation, etc. Specific offerings vary. Co-listed with AS.040.707.
Prerequisite(s): AS.040.207 AND AS.040.208 or equivalent
Area: Humanities
The aim of this course is to increase proficiency and improve comprehension of the Latin language. Intensive reading of Latin texts, with close attention to matters of grammar, idiom, and translation. Co-listed with AS.040.710.
Prerequisite(s): AS.040.207 AND AS.040.208 or equivalent
Area: Humanities
One of the most fundamental human questions is: Where does life come from? It is no wonder that we find an array of theories and controversies already in our earliest written records. In this course we will follow the various “genetic theories” through the millennia and explore the influence they still exercise today. What did people think about heredity, evolution, the contribution of male and female to life? And what role did technology play in all of this? We will explore the earliest Greek philosophers, Aristotle, the scientific revolution, Darwin, and modern theorists. We will trace how speculation has slowly evolved into scientific method, but always stays embedded in its surrounding societies.All texts in English. Dean’s Teaching Fellowship course.
Area: Humanities
Through texts, art, and archaeological remains, this course examines the various worlds of Homer--those recalled in the Iliad and Odyssey, those within which the epics were composed, and those born of the poet's unique creative work. Class will make museum visits. Ancient texts read in translation..
Area: Humanities
This course explores the visual and material worlds of ancient Cyprus from the earliest human evidence through the Iron Age. Class involves regular analysis of artifacts based in the Archaeological Museum.
Area: Humanities
This experiential learning laboratory is experimental and imaginatively conceived, bringing together two partners that appear, at first glance, to exist very distantly apart: Modern Cosmology and Ancient Greek thought. Notwithstanding appearances, however, there are remarkable resonances between the fundamental cosmological questions that ancient thinkers grappled with and those that preoccupy cosmologists today. Such questions include: How big is the Universe? How old is it? How did the Universe evolve – and how will it end? Why is there something – rather than nothing at all? Is there Life (or Lyfe) elsewhere? The course will be built around a series of laboratory-style projects, which students will tackle in groups, and these will involve cosmological fieldwork, most likely at the Algonquin Radio Observatory in Ontario, Canada (tbc). Through these projects we will explore deep connections as well as differences between the ideas and language of ancient and modern cosmologies and help us understand the complex entanglements between cosmology and culture across time. No knowledge of math and physics or Ancient Greek is required, but some discussions will be quantitative. Come travel with us through time!
This intensive Latin survey is designed for very advanced undergraduate students--normally those who have completed two semesters of Advanced Latin (AS.040.307/308)--and PhD students preparing for their Latin translation exam. In this course, the first half of a year-long sequence, we will read substantial texts of major Republican and some Augustan authors. The weekly pace is designed to inculcate greater speed and accuracy in Latin reading, and provide significant coverage of various kinds of texts.Recommended background: AS.040.307-308 or equivalent
Prerequisite(s): AS.040.307 AND AS.040.308 or permission of instructor.
Area: Humanities
This intensive Latin survey is designed for very advanced undergraduate students (normally those who have completed the regular undergraduate sequence through the advanced level) and PhD students preparing for their Latin translation exam. In this course, the second half of a year-long sequence, we will read substantial texts of major Imperial authors, as well as a selection of works from Late Antiquity and the Post-Classical period. The weekly pace is designed to inculcate greater speed and accuracy in Latin reading and to provide significant coverages of various kinds of texts. Prior completion of AS.040.407 preferred but not required.
Prerequisite(s): AS.040.307 AND AS.040.308 or equivalent.
Area: Humanities
We shall read an extensive selection of major texts of Greek literature from Homer to the classical period.
Area: Humanities
We shall read, in the original Greek, major authors of Greek Literature from the Hellenistic period to the Imperial period.
Area: Humanities
This course gives participants a unique opportunity to engage directly in empirical research and its interpretation and dissemination. Topics vary. There are no prerequisites, but potential students should contact the instructor for permission to enroll.
Area: Humanities
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
This course explores the visual and material worlds of ancient Cyprus from the earliest human evidence through the Iron Age. Class involves regular analysis of artifacts based in the Archaeological Museum.
This seminar proposes an in-depth exploration of Homer’s Odyssey. One of the monumental epics of ancient Greek and a foundational text of world-literature, the Odyssey examines, through one man’s quest to make his way home, profound questions concerning the nature of identity, the meaning of suffering, the importance of sharing stories, and the strange allure of poetry itself. We will study Books 1-12 of the poem in the original Greek in order to gain advanced understanding of its language and style. Emphasis will also be placed on the study of commentaries and scholarship in order to enhance our understanding of the poem’s themes, the transmission of the text, and the historical, literary and social contexts in which-and in response to which-it grew.
This graduate seminar focuses on the oral practices that constitute “literary culture” in Rome in the first and second centuries CE: declamation, recitation, disputation emerging from reading, and the relationship of these practices to both literary “publication” and to arenas of traditional oratory such as the courts and the Senate. Weekly assignments will include substantial readings in Latin.
This graduate seminar examines work and labor in Latin literature, beginning with a close reading of Vergil's Georgics in Latin. We will pay particular attention to the female, enslaved, and non-human labor that elite male authors silence or sublimate, as well as the interpretive and methodological challenges that arise. Students will co-design the reading list; lead discussions around texts, topics and theories relevant to their research; and workshop one abstract, one grant proposal, and one conference paper each. Reading ability in Latin is required.
This seminar explores intersections between science and wonder in ancient Greek and Roman literature.
With a focus on material culture from the ancient Mediterranean, this seminar explores the diversity of ways in which objects may be understood to have lives or to be active elements of humans' lived experience. The seminar meets in the Archaeological Museum, where we can pair direct examination of objects with an exploration of multiple theoretical approaches and interests, such as object biography and agency, affordance theory, object-oriented ontologies, material animacies, embodiment, ecological and enactive perception, and the ongoing post-depositional existences of archaeological material. Students will eventually select an object as the focus of an individual research project.
A study of the Roman poet Ovid’s timeless tale of change, explored in relationship to the philosophical Daoism of Zhuangzi and to recent critical and philosophical concepts such as becoming, transformation, autopoeisis.
This course will survey works in Latin and the vernacular by the fifteenth-century Florentine humanist Angelo Poliziano, with particular attention to his correspondence, and with recourse to a variety of theoretical approaches, from classical reception theory to queer theory. Good reading ability in classical Latin is required; the same in Italian is ideal but not required.
This graduate seminar will explore Plato’s contributions to the “old quarrel” between poetry and philosophy, encompassing such topics as the relationship between poetic inspiration and human reason, the role of literature in pedagogy, and the metaphysical implications of poetic fiction. We will focus on several Greek texts from the Platonic corpus related to these themes, as well as some later sources that engage with Platonic ideas.
A well-documented feature of the middle to late Roman republic is the ferocious competitiveness of the aristocracy, and the governing class in particular. These people competed for prestige and glory on the battlefield, for offices and honors in government and administration, for visibility in public building, in forensic oratory in the courts, in deliberative oratory in various assemblies, and sometimes in literary production. Less well-understood is how the competitiveness of this group manifested itself in the early imperial age, as the emergence of the emperor shut down competition in some of these arenas and fundamentally changed the character of the competition in others. This seminar considers how some old arenas changed under the Imperial regime, and examines new forms that aristocratic competition assumed to make up for the arenas that had altogether disappeared.
This course covers essential Greek and Latin texts (e.g. Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Plutarch) and the commentary tradition (e.g. scholia to Homer and other important authors). Focus is on poetic texts, with some prose.
In this course, we will follow the fortunes of the Greek novels from the Byzantine period onward, focusing especially on Heliodorus' _Aethiopica_. Knowledge of Greek is highly desirable but not required.
This reading seminar is intended to train graduate students in direct and critical work on primary sources. Co-listed with AS.040.306.
This reading seminar is intended to train graduate students in direct and critical work on primary sources. Co-listed with AS.040.305. Recommended Course Background: AS.040.205-AS.040.206.
Area: Humanities
This reading seminar is intended to train graduate students in direct and critical work on primary sources. Co-listed with AS.040.307.
This reading seminar is intended to train graduate students in direct and critical work on primary sources. Co-listed with AS.040.308. Recommended Course Background: AS.040.207-AS.040.208.
Area: Humanities
Study in preparation for a comprehensive oral exam, required to become a PhD candidate, and consisting of three fields in classics and related areas.
Study in preparation for a comprehensive oral exam, required to become a PhD candidate, and consisting of three fields in classics and related areas
No Audits.
No Audits.
Summer independent research for doctoral students.
Cross Listed Courses
Archaeology
An introduction to archaeology and to archaeological method and theory, exploring how archaeologists excavate, analyze, and interpret ancient remains in order to reconstruct how ancient societies functioned. Specific examples from a variety of archaeological projects in different parts of the world will be used to illustrate techniques and principles discussed.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
English
The course will account for the major transformations in the media used for writing from the scroll to the web as well as the rich account of this history and its theorizations.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
First Year Seminars
This First-Year Seminar will focus on the figure of Socrates. Socrates wrote nothing, so we depend on others for our knowledge of him. We will examine the ways he is portrayed by several different authors, including Plato. We will also examine some other ideas around in his time - some of which were pretty radical - and consider how he may have reacted to them. Finally, we will examine his influence on later thought.
Area: Humanities
This First-Year Seminar focuses on the cultures of dining and drinking in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, with excursions into the foodways of other ancient societies abutting the Mediterranean basin. We will investigate the social practices and values that are associated with conviviality in these societies, and how such practices and values change over time. We will consider the kinds of communities that these practices construct, and how and to what extent different kinds of people are included, excluded, or placed in a social hierarchy by their participation in these practices. Special attention will be given to feasting as represented in the Homeric poems, especially the Odyssey; to the Archaic and Classical Greek symposion; and to the Roman convivium and other dining forms extending to late Antiquity. Fueling our investigation and underpinning our discussions will be a wide variety of ancient Greek and Roman texts (to be read in English translation); images and representations of ancient dining in diverse visual media, including Greek vase painting, Roman wall painting, and mosaics; and archaeological evidence for the spaces, settings, and implements of ancient dining and drinking. Throughout, we will engage with key scholarship on aspects of this topic. The seminar includes visits to the Walters Art Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum, all of which house objects that illuminate our inquiry. It may also involve screenings of films or clips featuring modern imaginative reconstructions of ancient dining events.
Area: Humanities
We are living through a crisis in how we take in information. Bombarded by information of all sorts coming at us on phones, tablets, and computer screens, it can be difficult to make sense of it all and harder still to determine whether something is true or false, authentic or inauthentic. The scale and speed of the change in media that we are undergoing is unprecedented in human history. Nevertheless, people in the past have faced moments of crisis – moments when writing seemed unreliable, when the format of written information changed, and when new publication formats forced reevaluations of the nature of truth. This First-Year Seminar will take us from Greco-Roman antiquity to the modern age, with stops along the way in the European Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Enlightenment. We will read selected texts that illuminate the place of writing, books, and the search for truth, think about the structure of libraries in the western Middle Ages and Renaissance, do extensive hands-on work with rare books, and visit other repositories of information, all toward the end of evaluating how the history of books and information can help us in our current quest to make sense of our world.
Area: Humanities
How did the Greeks, Romans, and other ancient Mediterranean peoples understand human difference and diversity? How did they form their senses of self in relation to others and articulate kinship and commonalities across ethnic lines? Did skin color, birthplace, language, and lineage matter in constructing social hierarchies? How did their concepts of class and citizenship, beauty and belonging, differ from ours? Did they have anything akin to modern constructions of race and racism, blackness and whiteness, the ‘west’ and the ‘rest’? If not, when and why were such ideas invented, and how was Greco-Roman culture conscripted in their support? Finally and crucially, what can we do to make “classics” today more equitable, inclusive, and accurate to the multicultural reality of the ancient Mediterranean? This First-Year Seminar examines these questions, and many more, through the literature, art, and history of ancient Greece and Rome, with forays into Egypt, Persia, Judea, and northern Europe. It will introduce you to the diversity of the ancient Mediterranean world, hone your ability to critically interpret and discuss art, literature, and scholarship, and explore how systems of categorizing human difference have historically served power. This course will give you a wider historical lens through which to understand race, racecraft, the “classics,” and “Western civilization,” revealing all to be dynamic and historically situated discourses that have been used to exert authority, to include or exclude, and to build communities. It will also build student community and comfort discussing sensitive subjects through a combination of field trips, guest lectures, movie nights, and communal meals.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken AS.040.212 are not eligible to take AS.001.179.
Area: Humanities
This First-Year Seminar will take us on an exploratory journey through the history of our Moon, both as a physical body in its own right and as a formative presence in the cultural imagination. As we examine theories about the Moon’s nature and role in the cosmos - from antiquity to our modern period, and from science to make-believe - we will delve deep into perplexing questions such as the relationship between scientific and imaginative thought, the role played by conspiracy-theory and hoax in our society, the origins of speculation about extraterrestrial life, and what it means to map and write the history of other worlds... This seminar will include sessions of practical observation of the Moon from the JHU Observatory.
Area: Humanities
History
Objects from the past offer a powerful window into a set of experiences not recorded in texts. We will follow objects and things as they appear in lists, letters, and descriptions, as they travel surprising routes, and bring to life the medieval world before 1400.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
History of Art
This thematic course will explore the art, architecture, material culture, and textual evidence from the ancient city of Athens, the many cultures and social positions that made up the ancient city, and the idea of the city as something far beyond its reality. We will take a number of field trips to museums in the area and some of your assignments will be based in local museums.
Area: Humanities
In antiquity, Rome became the capital of an empire, its growing status reflected in its sophisticated urban planning, its architecture, and the arts. While an abundance of studies explores the revival of this glorious past in the Renaissance, this seminar discusses various ways of the reception of antiquity during the medieval period. We address the practice of using "spolia" in medieval architecture, the appropriation of ancient pagan buildings for the performance of Christian cult practices, the continuation of making (cult)images and their veneration, the meaning and specific visuality of Latin script (paleography and epigraphy) in later medieval art. We discuss the revival and systematic study of ancient knowledge (f. ex. medicine, astronomy, and the liberal arts), in complex allegorical murals. As we aim to reconstruct the art and architecture of medieval Rome, this course discusses ideas and concepts behind different forms of re-building and picturing the past, as they intersect with the self-referential character of a city that is obsessed with its own history.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
The Antioch Recovery Project is an ongoing, iterative research lab course dedicated to the study of mosaics from the city of Antioch-on-the-Orontes and its surroundings (modern Antakya, Turkey). Led by principal investigator Jennifer Stager, ARP works in collaboration with a number of experts at Hopkins and in the Baltimore area, as well as with the global community of Antioch researchers to explore the mosaics across three distinct moments: ancient Antioch, the early 20th century excavations, and collection afterlives. No experience necessary.
Area: Humanities
The discipline of art history has passed through a number of major methodological and theoretical shifts since its inception (and in particular, over the last thirty years). Foundational disciplinary methods derive principally from the arts of Classical Greece, the Renaissance and contemporary periods. As the discipline embraces an enlarged field of inquiry, particularly drawing upon developments in anthropology, material culture studies, feminism, queer theory, and political theory, additional avenues for understanding the arts of the ancient world are emerging. The seminar focuses on how art historical method and theory – both foundational and emergent – might be profitably applied to the subfields of the ancient Near East and eastern Mediterranean (understood in the broadest sense).
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Bodies—material, artistic, political, cartographic—and their breakdown, form the focus of this seminar. Situating this inquiry in the ancient Mediterranean, we will analyze the human body as an organizing term, giving rise to a robust set of practices and performances. We will consider the conception of atoms as bodies in motion, the role of direct democracy and assembly as they intersect with artistic practices of both figuration and other non-figural corpora, and the emerging body of medical knowledge that would eventually be gathered under the Hippocratic corpus. The Mediterranean sea itself as it connects with other bodies of water and forged connections between different land bodies will also be among the topics we explore. While organized around the ancient Mediterranean and its afterlives, students from all formations are very welcome.
Area: Humanities
Interdepartmental
Students attend lectures by an interdepartmental group of Hopkins faculty and meet for discussion in smaller seminar groups; each of these seminars is led by one of the course faculty. In lectures, panels, multimedia presentations, and curatorial sessions among the University's rare book holdings, we will explore some of the greatest works of the literary and philosophical traditions in Europe and the Americas. Close reading and intensive writing instruction are hallmarks of this course; authors for Fall 2020 include Homer, Plato, Dante, John Donne, George Herbert, Christina Rosetti, Mary Shelley, Friederick Nietzsche, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Frederick Douglass.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Medicine, Science and the Humanities
In this course, four essential aspects of the theme of death and dying will be examined: Death and Medicine; Emotional Responses to Death; Burying and Commemorating the Dead; and Conceptions of Death. Specific topics relating to each of these aspects that will be covered include illness and causes of death; prevention of death; suicide; death and grief; burial practices; mourning the dead; public commemoration of the dead; life after death; and death and rebirth. Students will explore these topics from a historical-anthropological perspective with Paul Delnero, a specialist in the history and culture of the ancient Near East (Near Eastern Studies); from a literary perspective, by reading and writing poetry relating to these subjects with the acclaimed poet James Arthur (Writing Seminars); and from a musical perspective, through direct encounters with the music and creative process of the award-winning composer, Michael Hersch (Peabody).
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Modern Languages and Literatures
Who were the witches? Why were they persecuted for hundreds of years? Why were women identified as the witches par excellence? How many witches were put to death between 1400 and 1800? What traits did European witch-mythologies share with other societies? After the witch-hunts ended, how did “The Witch” go from being “monstrous” to being “admirable” and even “sexy”? Answers are found in history and anthropology, but also in medicine, theology, literature, folklore, music, and the visual arts, including cinema.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have already taken AS.214.171 cannot take AS.211.477.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Italian and French humanists transformed the medieval adventure stories of Charlemagne’s and Arthur’s knights. The course concentrates on Luigi Pulci’s earthy, bourgeois Morgante, Teofilo Folengo’s Macaronic (Latin/Italian dialect) Baldus, and Rabelais’s encyclopedic Gargantua and Pantagruel, combining close analysis of their linguistic and narrative fabric with examples of their influence on later comic narrative masterpieces.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Near Eastern Studies
How do art historians and archaeologists recover and study genders and sexualities of ancient people? This writing-intensive seminar looks at texts and objects from ancient Egypt, Assyria, and Greece through the lens of gender and sexuality studies. Beyond exploring concepts of gender in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean, students will also consider how modern scholars have approached, recovered, and written about ancient gender identities. There are no prerequisites for this course.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
The ancient Egyptians played many games, as we do today. Board games, ball games, games of skill, etc., were not only part of daily life, but also had a role to play in religious practices and beliefs. Although the rules of the games are largely unknown to us, archaeological objects, funerary images, and texts help us to better understand their roles and meanings in ancient Egyptian culture. These various sources also show how games reflect some facets of the organization of the society, and reveal how the ancient Egyptians perceived some aspects of their world - social hierarchy, gender division, representation of death, relationship to chance/fate/divine will, etc. This course will present the evolution of games and play in Ancient Egypt from the 4th millennium B.C., with the first board game discovered in the tomb of a woman, through those deposited in the tomb of Tutankhamun, and up to the Roman period, with the games engraved on the ground by soldiers in the fortresses of the Eastern Desert. Particular attention will be paid to the travels of the games - Egyptian games played outside of Egypt and games of foreign origin played inside Egypt - because they allow for a better understanding of the intercultural connections that were established in between Egypt, Nubia, the Near East in general and the Mediterranean world. By replacing the games in their archaeological, historical and cultural contexts, the course is also intended as an original introduction to the civilization of ancient Egypt.
Area: Humanities
The ancient Egyptians played many games, as we do today. Board games, ball games, games of skill, etc., were not only part of daily life, but also had a role to play in religious practices and beliefs. Although the rules of the games are largely unknown to us, archaeological objects, funerary images, and texts help us to better understand their roles and meanings in ancient Egyptian culture. These various sources also show how games reflect some facets of the organization of the society, and reveal how the ancient Egyptians perceived some aspects of their world - social hierarchy, gender division, representation of death, relationship to chance/fate/divine will, etc. This course will present the evolution of games and play in Ancient Egypt from the 4th millennium B.C., with the first board game discovered in the tomb of a woman, through those deposited in the tomb of Tutankhamun, and up to the Roman period, with the games engraved on the ground by soldiers in the fortresses of the Eastern Desert. Particular attention will be paid to the travels of the games - Egyptian games played outside of Egypt and games of foreign origin played inside Egypt - because they allow for a better understanding of the intercultural connections that were established in between Egypt, Nubia, the Near East in general and the Mediterranean world. By replacing the games in their archaeological, historical and cultural contexts, the course is also intended as an original introduction to the civilization of ancient Egypt.
Area: Humanities
Philosophy
A survey of the earlier phase of Greek philosophy. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle will be discussed, as well as two groups of thinkers who preceded them, usually known as the pre-Socratics and the Sophists.
Area: Humanities
A study of pre-Socratic philosophers, especially those to whom Plato reacted; also an examination of major dialogues of Plato with emphasis upon his principal theses and characteristic methods. Cross-listed with Classics.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
A study of major selected texts of Aristotle.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
A study of later Greek philosophy, stretching roughly from the death of Aristotle to the Roman imperial period. Epicureans, Stoics, and Skeptics will be the main philosophical schools examined.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course revisits the idea of tragedy as represented in Ancient Greek thought for the purpose of approaching questions of flourishing and ethical living from a different angle.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Program in Museums and Society
What role did the colorful surfaces of sculptures, vessels and textiles play in the ancient world? We examine historical texts and recent scholarly and scientific publications on the technologies and meanings of color in antiquity, and use imaging and analytical techniques to study polychromed objects from the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
As part of an ongoing collaboration with the Baltimore Museum of Art, students are invited to contribute to a special exhibition about touch and tactility in 20th century American art. Research artists such as Jasper Johns, Yoko Ono, Betye Saar, Felix Gonzalex-Torres, create thematic installations, and conceptualize museum interpretation to activate the tactile dimensions of art.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences