Calendar

COLING Conference Dry Runs @ HSSB 4080

Jan 10 @ 3:30 pm – 5:00 pm

Jan

LOREL Lab Grand Opening Celebration @ McCune Conference Room – HSSB 6020

Jan 17 @ 10:00 am – 5:00 pm

Schedule of Events:

10:00 AM
Coffee

10:30 AM
Nick Bartos (UCLA): “Far from Home: Diaspora Networks, Religion, and Identity Abroad on the Ancient Indian Ocean”

12:00 PM
Lunch

1:30 PM
LOREL Lab (UCSB): “Cognitive Geographics of Catastrophe Narratives: Georeferenced Interview Transcriptions as Language Resource for Models of Forced Displacement”

3:00 PM
Mark Algee-Hewitt (Stanford University): Title TBD

For further information, please contact Prof. Lamar.

Jan

Wed

“Decolonizing Linguistics: Colonial Geographics” (LOREL Lab Book Club Series) @ HSSB 4080

Jan 29 @ 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm

Part of the LOREL Lab Book Club Series, co-hosted by A-CAUSE.

Sat

“Minoritizing Classics” Colloquium @ HSSB 4080

Feb 8 @ 9:00 am – 5:00 pm

Colloquium co-organized by Erin Lam and Helen Morales. Confirmed participants include: Sukaina Hirji (Penn); Kelly Nguyen (UCLA); Hannah Silverblank (independent scholar); and Mathura Umachandran (Exeter, UK).

Latin Sight Examination

Feb 14 @ 12:30 pm – 5:00 pm

Categories: Graduate Exams

Wed

“Decolonizing Linguistics: The Scholar as Disruptor” (LOREL Lab Book Club Series) @ Jeffrey’s Jazz Coffeehouse

Feb 19 @ 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm

Workshop on Decolonizing the Academy.

Part of the LOREL Lab Book Club Series, co-hosted by A-CAUSE.

Lydia Spielberg (UCLA), “‘Ancillary Justice’: Testimony, Torture, and Truth in Tacitus’ Annals”

Feb 21 @ 3:30 pm – 5:00 pm

In this paper, Prof. Spielberg examines the epistemological and historiographical consequences of Roman chattel slavery through a close reading of several episodes in Tacitus’ Annals where the historian reveals that his knowledge turns out to depend on the testimony of enslaved or formerly enslaved individuals – testimony often extracted under torture, on the assumption that only force majeure could break an individual’s fear of and consequent obedience to the interests of their enslaver. Tacitus uses contemporary legal discourse and rhetorical topoi to differentiate torture variously as an unproblematic method for extracting the truth from “disloyal” or “wicked” slaves (Ann. 4.11.2), and as an insidious tool of accusers that the “loyal slave” heroically resists (e.g. A. 4.29.3, 14.60.3). While other types of sources are “trustworthy” because they have been found to adhere to the truth, in the slaveholding ideology that the Annals shares, an enslaved person’s testimony has value not for being true, but for demonstrating loyalty to the orders and interests of the enslaver.

The efficacy of torture as a means to prove the truth in the Annals, Prof. Spielberg shows, has a moral slant not only according to whether the torturer conducts a legitimate interrogation according to contemporary “best practices”, but also according to the “worthiness” of the victim, in a bit of slaveholder fantasy that attempts to align the interests of the “good master” and the “good slave.” Yet, truth remains the historiographical criterion for a source, and Tacitus often introduces the testimony of enslaved and freed-persons as a secure source of “the facts” to be opposed to wild rumors and inventions. The selectivity of Tacitus’ presentation suggests some of the fictions that Roman slaveholders told themselves and tried to impose on those they dominated –including the enslaved secretaries, copyists, and readers whose labor produced and disseminated books such as the Annals.

Mon

CAMWS Dry Runs @ HSSB 4080

Feb 24 @ 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

Mantha Zarmakoupi (University of Pennsylvania), “Shaping Roman Landscape: Ecocritical Approaches to Architecture and Wall Painting in Early Imperial Italy”

Feb 28 @ 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm

Contemporary perceptions of the natural and built environment, as well as ideas about nature and art, were intertwined with the architectural and decorative trends of the Early Imperial period. In this presentation, I trace this process by examining ways in which the transformation of the natural and built environment and contemporary perceptions of it, as well as ideas about nature and art, related to the new architectural and decorative mannerisms of this period. I tackle the interrelation between real, visual, and virtual pictorial spaces in Roman villas, examining the ways in which the framing of painted and actual views of landscapes in Roman luxury villas moves between perceptual and conceptual space and transgresses traditional notions of pictoriality, and in so doing materializes the natural world into landscape in the Early Imperial period.

AIA Lecture.

Greek Sight Examination