CLASSICAL RECEPTIONS SYMPOSIUM
2-5pm, April 27, 2021 

With U Michigan faculty and graduate students and guest speaker
Dr. Patrice Rankine, University of Richmond 

Co-sponsored by Contexts for Classics, 
Topics in Classical Intersectionalities Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop, 
and the Department of Classical Studies, University of Michigan

Please register in advance for the symposium’s Zoom link here.

 

Schedule for Tuesday, April 27 

2-2:45 pm 
Opening Remarks: Disciplinarity and Knotty Problems 
Patrice Rankine, Dean and Professor of Classical Studies, U. Richmond

In graduate school, my classmates and I joked about--and were impressed with--those students of the classics who seemed fully absorbed in some minute issue apart from this time and place, such as the use of particles in Thucydides. Without relegating philology to a mindset of escapism, we wondered simultaneously 1) what might motivate the full immersion in another place and time, and whether that was even possible; and 2) what it was about us that was unable to disentangle identity from the matter at hand, the text, the image, or even the word. Both directions 1) and 2) represent the knotty problems of our discipline of classics, its construction, its vaunt, and perhaps its rehabilitation in the present historical moment, should we choose the honest confrontation evident in the papers aligned at this symposium. 

2:45 - 3:30 pm
Panel 1: Poetics of Classical Reception

Panel Chair: Professor Yopie Prins (Professor of Comparative Literature) 

    Fernando Gorab Leme (PhD student, Classical Studies): “If Clodia Despised Catullus, you can very well, Dionysus, despise Ariadne”

    Tomi Drucker (PhD student, Comparative Literature): “Io’s Signature: The Writing of the Body as Deconstruction of the Logocentric Speech in Ovid’s Io” 

    Lena Grimm (PhD student, Comparative Literature):  “Visuality and Embodiment in Anja Utler’s ‘sibyl--a poem in eight syllables’” 

3:30 - 4:30 pm 
Panel 2: Pedagogies of Classical Reception

Panel Chair: Ian Fielding (Assistant Professor of Classical Studies) 

    Sherman Clark (UM Professor of Law): “A Lawyer’s Odyssey and an Apology for Law”

    Sara Yeager (PhD student, Classical Studies): “Jerome’s Curriculum Vitae and the Departmental Division” 

    Grace Zanotti (PhD student, Comparative Literature): “dissertation conclusion final FINAL.docx: Finding Use for Greek Tragedy”

    Amanda Kubic (PhD student, Comparative Literature):   “Teaching Antigone in Ferguson and Carrie Mae Weems’ Past Tense - Pedagogical Dilemmas, Questions, and Insights 

4:30 - 5 pm 
Concluding Discussion: “Classics for All?”

Moderator: Professor Ian Moyer (Professor of History)

Concluding remarks and discussion with Dr. Rankine of his essay, “Classics for All? Liberal Education and the Matter of Black Lives” (from Classicisms in the Black Atlantic, ed. Ian Moyer, Adam Lecznar, Heidi Morse).

For questions related to the symposium, please contact William Soergel (wsoergel@umich.edu).