Congratulations to Andrew McClellan who had two essays published this summer:

Congratulations to Our Outstanding Graduating Seniors 

Congratulations to Assistant Professor of Public Humanities, Dr. April Anson, who was named scholar of the month by The Association for Literature.

Congratulations to our FOC Schuch Post-Doctoral Fellow, David Wallace Hare on the following new publications:  Bears as Benefactors? Bear Veneration as Apicultural Risk Management in Roman Spain in the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, 14(3), 324–350 and  “Pigs in the City, Bees on the Roof: Intraurban Animal Husbandry and Butchery in Roman Spain,” with K. Tardio, in Divergent Economies in the Roman World: Holistic Views on Habitual and Aberrant Practices, ca. 300 BC–AD 300, Palgrave Studies in Ancient Economies, edited by D. Van Limbergen, D. Taelman, and A. Hoffelinck, Palgrave Macmillan: London, forthcoming.

A Statement of Solidarity with Black Lives Matter and Against Anti-Blackness

SDSU’s College of Arts and Letters stands in solidarity with our Black communities. We denounce racism in any form and violence against Black people, and we stand firm in our belief that Black lives matter. As a community of university faculty and staff, it is our duty to actively support and advocate for solutions to systemic racism across our nation, the world, and our campus.  Read the full statement.

Congratulations to Andrew McClellan on his forthcoming chapter in the book, Latin Poetry and its Reception: Essays for Susanna Braund, ed. C.W. Marshall: chapter title: "Mens Humilis vs Superbia in Prudentius' Psychomachia."

New position

Please join us in congratulating our FOC Schuch Post Doctoral Fellow, Danielle Smotherman-Bennett, who has accepted an appointment as Curatorial Associate working with the Ancient Mediterranean art at the Menil Collection -- a collection of approximately 17,000 paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, photographs and rare books in Houston, Texas. In this position, she will be researching and cataloging the ancient objects in the collection, assisting with exhibition plans, and providing administrative support related to the collection.

Jazz Bastard Podcast featured on All About Jazz

The Jazz Bastard Podcast recently featured on All About Jazz, is the brainchild of Dr. Michael Caldwell and Dr. Patrick Burnette.  The podcast has amazingly totaled over 200 hours of content since its debut in late 2012. Learn more about the podcast by reading the full interview with Mike and Pat.

Article Coming Soon

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Danielle Smotherman Bennett, our Friends of Classics and Barbara Schuch Endowed Postdoctoral Fellow, whose article, “Targeted Advertising for Women in Athenian Vase-Painting of the Fifth Century BCE,” will be published in a special volume of the peer-reviewed journal Arts, Ancient Mediterranean Painting (Vol. 1)

Award for Teaching Excellence

Congratulations to Dr. Michael Caldwell who has been awarded this year’s College of Arts and Letters Excellence in Teaching Lecturer award! He will be recognized at the CAL commencement on May 17, 3:00 p.m and his name and bio will appear on CAL's website during the next academic year.

New Book

Please join us in congratulating our Stepsay Post-Doctoral Fellow, Dr. Andrew McClellan, whose book, Abused Bodies in Roman Epic, has been published by Cambridge University Press.

Article Accepted

Congratulations to Dr. Raechel Dumas whose article “Viral Affects and Economies of Desire in Hirotaka Tobi’s ‘Autogenic Dreaming,'" has been accepted for publication in Extrapolation, a leading journal in critical speculative fiction studies.

New Course

A new Religious Studies/Humanities class shows students differing concepts of evil through the ages, and then challenges them to do something about it. The course, Understanding Evil (Religious Studies/Humanities 411), was featured on SDSU NewsCenter and is taught this semester by Dr. Angela Feres. Read the article.

Daily Aztec Feature

Our Friends of Classics and Barbara Schuch Endowed Postdoctoral Fellow in Classics and Digital Humanities, Dr. Danielle Smotherman Bennett, was featured in the recent article "3D Greek digital photographic library allows researchers to piece together remnants of the past" for the Daily Aztec. Read the article.

Articles Soon to be Published

Please join us in congratulating our very own Dr. Raechel Dumas whose articles: “Atsumenia: Strategic Accumulation and Networks of Desire in Collection-Based Smartphone Games” in The Journal of Popular Culture and "'It is Happening Again': Traumatic Memory, Affective Renewal, and Deferred Resolution in Twin Peaks: The Return" in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, have both been accepted for publication.

National Translation Competition Winner

Congratulations to Classics major Ryan Shue who placed first in Intermediate Latin at a national translation competition sponsored by Eta Sigma Phi, the national honors society for Classical Studies.

Dead Sea Scrolls Exhibit

The Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science closed on September 4.  Dr. Risa Levitt, chair of the Classics and Humanities and Religious Studies and director of the Jewish Studies Program, curated the exhibit. 

The exhibition has been traveling in North America since 2010 and has had over one million visitors.  Denver was the seventh showing for the scrolls and included two never before seen scrolls.  Over 250,000 people visited the exhibition in Denver, which sold out 75% of the days it was open.

View photos from the exhibit (courtesy of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science).  Read news stories about the exhibit: 5280 Denver’s Mile High Magazine | 303 Magazine | Haaretz.

New Book

Congratulations to Dr. Raechel Dumas, whose book, The Monstrous-Feminine in Contemporary Japanese Popular Culture, will be published by Palgrave Macmillan later this year. The book explores the monstrous-feminine in Japanese popular culture, produced from the late years of the 1980s through to the new millennium.Dr. Dumas examines the role of female monsters in selected works of fiction, manga, film, and video games, offering a trans-genre, trans-media analysis of this enduring trope. It focuses on several iterations of the monstrous-feminine in contemporary Japan: the self-replicating shōjo in horror, monstrous mothers in science fiction, female ghosts and suburban hauntings in cinema, female monsters and public violence in survival horror games, and the rebellious female body in mytho-fiction. Situating the titles examined here amid discourses of crisis that have materialized in contemporary Japan, Dumas illuminates the ambivalent pleasure of the monstrous-feminine as a trope that both articulates anxieties centered on shifting configurations of subjectivity and nationhood, and elaborates novel possibilities for identity negotiation and social formation in a period marked by dramatic change.

Stories of Ukraine

Wednesday, August 17, 2022
9 - 10 am  PST (12-1 pm EDT)
Free Zoom Program - RSVP required
 
In 2019, a team from the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) travelled to Ukraine to interview Ukrainians on identity and culture. Follow the project’s journey with team members Risa Levitt, Myroslav Shkrandrij, Anzhelika Vengrus, and Daniela Rupolo, and its response to shifting experiences of Ukrainian identity between 2019 and 2022. Through video storytelling and exclusive interviews, the Ukraine Project offers a compelling record of a country's ongoing cultural journey and introduces video recordings as powerful and significant additions to museum collections, exploring the various tangible and intangible ways stories can be told. 

 

LatinNow: Latinization of the North-Western Roman Provinces

Featuring Alex Mullen and Pieter Houten of the University of Nottingham

Mar 19, 2021 12:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

LatinNow is a European Research Council-funded interdisciplinary project combining sociolinguistics, epigraphy and archaeology to write social history (2017–2023). Between the Iron Age and the end of the Roman period the linguistic landscapes of the north-western Roman provinces were dramatically reconfigured. LatinNow explores the nature of the spread of Latin, varieties of Latin, the uptake of literacy, bi- and multilingualism and the fates of local languages. We relate the linguistic patterning to other social practices to try to understand lived experience in the Roman west.

This investigation requires us to cut across provincial boundaries, those between the Iron Age, Roman and post Roman periods, and to reach beyond Classics to disciplines such as modern sociolinguistics and Palaeoeuropean studies. We also rely on Digital Humanities to help us to read, encode, and publish ancient epigraphy, to harness the potential of large existing epigraphic and non-epigraphic datasets, and to analyse material in ways impossible without digital resources and techniques.

This talk will introduce the project and some of the highlights of our work made possible through DH, from reading 2000-year-old texts with Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) to mapping patterns of Latinization across our provinces using Geographic Information Systems (GIS).