Congratulations to our Outstanding Graduating Seniors and their Most Influential Faculty Member

 

SDSU Mundt Peace Scholars Engage in Humanitarian Work in South Africa

Students made impacts during their eight-week service-learning internships in Cape Town.

Last summer humanities major, Darya Ardehali, was one of eight SDSU students who spent eight weeks with various organizations working to help solve some of South Africa’s most pressing issues—a transformative event in her life. 

Read the full story on SDSU NewsCenter.

Humanities major Da Quanisha “Day” Parks won a Diversity, Inclusion, and Social Justice research award for her presentation “#EnvironmentalJustice.Now” at this year’s SDSU Student Symposium.  Her faculty mentor was Professor Kishauna Soljour.  Congratulations Day!

In 2019 the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) sent team members Risa Levitt, Myroslav Shkrandrij, Anzhelika Vengrus, and Daniela Rupolo traveled to Ukraine to interview its people on their perspectives of identity and culture.

In this authentic and powerful original series, interviewees reflect upon their own understandings of collective identity, and the experiences that impact their uncertain future. 

View the online experience.

Check out the new web zine and teaching resource, Against the Ecofascist Creep. The zine exposes and debunks six "everyday ecofascist" myths.

This cross-disciplinary resource is the work of

• April Anson (SDSU),
• Cassie Galentine (University of Oregon),
• Shane Hall (Salisbury University),
• Alex Menrisky (University of Connecticut), and
• Bruno Seraphin (Cornell University).  

And features the graphic design brilliance of SDSU grad student Melody Keenan.  

The full zine is available at the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment’s (ASLE) Teaching Resources Database.

Learn more about the zine.

Congratulations to our outstanding graduating senior, Aaron Karl P. Garcia. Aaron is a humanities major and has chosen Professor Risa Levitt as their most influential faculty.

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.

Classics and Science Fiction from “Frankenstein” to the Technoscientific Present

Thursday, April 25
5:30-6:45 p.m.
Peterson Gym

This talk examines the deep relationship between science fiction and ancient Greece and Rome, ranging from the roles of ancient myth and literature in the advent of modern science fiction to the ways in which futuristic sci-fi and the cultural output of the ancient past can help us think through pressing issues of modernity.

Jesse Weiner is associate professor and chair of classics at Hamilton College in Clinton, NY. Before arriving at Hamilton, he taught classics at University of California, Irvine; California State University, Long Beach; and Illinois Wesleyan University. He has published numerous articles on Greek and Latin literature, drama, and classical reception studies with strong interests in monumentality, memory, aesthetics, and gender studies. He is co-editor of “Frankenstein and Its Classics: The Modern Prometheus from Antiquity to Science Fiction” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) and “Searching for the Cinaedus in Ancient Rome” (Brill, 2023). In public humanities, Weiner has worked with Ancient Greeks/Modern Lives, and his work has appeared in History Today and The Atlantic.

 

SDSU Welcomes Artist Shanequa Benitez

Benitez examines questions of identity and community. Her artwork and activism challenges political, environmental, and social structures. During the residency, Shanequa will engage a broad-cross section of the SDSU community in conversation and practice.

Wednesday, April 10

Redlined
5 p.m.
Burnett Seminar Room (AL 109)
SDSU School of Theatre, Television, and Film presents a screening of "A Raisin in the Sun" followed by a panel discussion.

Thursday, April 11

Artist Workshop: But It's Ours Tote Bag Making
10 a.m.
Prison Arts Collective with Project Rebound (Closed session - Invite only) 

Artist Talk + Reception
12 p.m.
Faculty/Staff Club
A reception, sponsored by the College of Professional Studies and Fine Arts, follows the talk at 1 p.m.
RSVP for the Talk + Reception

Sponsored by Institute for the Arts, Humanities, and Social Justice, the Department of Classics and Humanities, the Center for Public and Oral History, and the Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs.

 

Monuments, Art, Activism & Public History

A Lunch and Learn Webinar

Tuesday, April 30
12-1:30 p.m. PST
via Zoom - Register for the link

This webinar highlights groundbreaking projects from across the United States. It is presented in cooperation with the California State Parks and SDSU Relevancy and History initiative at Old Town State Historic Park. The Relevancy & History Project is an innovative public humanities initiative that seeks to highlight underrepresented histories and voices in order to advance and integrate, equity, inclusion, social justice practices within the interpretive landscape of California State Parks.

Featuring:

Angela Mason
Executive Director, Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice

Vinnie Bagwell
Sculptor and Author

Nathan Ellstrand, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral DPAA Research Partner Fellow, San Diego State University

Sponsored by the Department of Classics and Humanities, the Department of History, the Center for Public and Oral History, and the Californian State Parks.

 

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).