Current Graduate Courses & Descriptions

2023-2024 Graduate Courses & Descriptions

Prose Composition

Language-Intensive Courses

Research Seminars

Prose Composition Course Descriptions

GRK1000F Advanced Greek Language - B. Akrigg

A course designed to enhance language skills. Prose composition, sight translation, stylistic analysis of classical Greek prose. 

Students should enhance their skills in reading Greek prose in this course. Specifically, at the end of the course they should: 

• have increased confidence and ability in reading classical Greek prose at sight 
• be able to translate passages of English prose into classical Greek prose 
• have improved their appreciation of classical Greek prose style 

Graduate students entering the program will already have the knowledge they need for accomplishing these objectives; this course will focus on the application of that knowledge and the development of some appropriate skills. 

LAT1000S Advanced Latin Language - J. Welsh

TBA

Language Instensive Course Descriptions

LAT1810F Advanced Latin Language - M. Dewar

The principal aims of this course are, first and foremost, to help students improve their general fluency in reading the various genres of Latin literature, both prose and verse, and, secondly, to help them become more familiar with the texts they are required to read for the MA Qualifying Examinations. To provide some sense of unity, we shall read texts written under the Julio-Claudian dynasty (27 BC – AD 68). We shall begin with Augustus himself, in his Res Gestae. Students will be consulted early in the term to determine which other texts on the MA Qualifying Examinations Reading Lists they prefer to study in class.

GRK1800S Special Topics in Greek Literature - R. Höschele

The purpose of this course is to deepen students' familiarity with the Greek poetic tradition and to improve their skills in reading Greek verse. We will concentrate on texts from the reading list (with a special, though not exclusive focus, on those required for the MA-examinations). Apart from practicing translation, we will study various Greek meters and examine the circumstances of production and reception of poetry in a variety of contexts from the Archaic to the Hellenistic age.

Research Seminars Course Descriptions

CLA5028F Economics, Ethics and the Classics - B. Akrigg & K. Blouin

This course offers a multidisciplinary exploration of the economical and ethical entanglements of Classical Antiquity and Antiquities. Through a theoretically-engaged, case-based and experiential approach that will draw from a wide variety of primary evidence, students will be led to reflect on issues such as the geopolitical entailments of public and private collections and displays, provenance and forgeries, the materiality of ancient texts, the ethics of edition and publication, as well as the marketization and appropriation of 'Classics' in a variety of (chronological, national, ideological) contexts. This course will be of interest to students in all streams of the Classics program, as well as to students in other departments (Religion, Anthropology, Arts, Museum Studies, Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations).

CLA5004F Studies in Greek Poetry: Women’s Writing in the Classical Tradition - A. Keith

Readings in Greek lyric, elegy, and epigram (and their reception in the classical tradition), with a focus on female-authored poetry in dialogue with feminist critical theory. We will start with Sappho and consider her importance as a fountainhead of lyric, elegy, and epigram in classical antiquity, before working through the extant writings of Korinna, Praxilla, Telesilla, Erinna, Moero, Anyte, Nossis, Serui filia Sulpicia, and Julia Balbilla. We will explore the complex textual histories of this surviving body of poetry and investigate women’s writings in the shifting canons (both ancient and modern) of classical literature from the intersectional perspectives and practices of feminist criticism.

CLA5021S Classics and Translation - M. Revermann

This seminar, which is largely shaped by perspectives developed in the vibrant and quickly evolving field of Translation Studies, seeks to map the position of Classics, both as an archive of material from Greco-Roman antiquity and as an academic discipline, relative to the cultural practice of translation. It is fundamentally informed by a simple yet crucial hermeneutic fact: the people of Greco-Roman antiquity, and with them their languages, are ‘dead’ in ways different from, say, the contemporaries of Dante, Shakespeare or Pope. As one consequence of this, there is no ongoing thread of ‘live’ cultural transmission through language: the linguistic products of Greco-Roman antiquity are only accessible through translation, with no means of even remote verifiability or falsifiability by recourse to a native speaker or to the linguistic descendants of such a native speaker. 

Among the areas of investigation in this project will be norms and strategies which have shaped translation practices in various European countries and in North America over the past 400 or so years; the complex task of translating fragmentary material; the various translatorial responses to the challenges posed by the metres in which Graeco-Roman poetic texts were composed; the question of the translator’s (in)visibility in the field of Classical Studies; the evolving, but also in some ways exceptionally static, interfaces between translation and lexicography; translators’ prefaces as sites of disclosure; and the time-honoured but increasingly contentious practice of ‘back-translation’ into Latin or ancient Greek and its real or imagined intellectual benefits. Pedagogical issues that arise from the omnipresence of translation as an evaluative tool and a crucial element of any Classicist’s training will also be discussed. 

Case studies will be drawn widely from Graeco-Roman literature, including Homer, Sappho, Pindar, Aristophanes, Sophocles, Virgil, Propertius, Petronius, Seneca, Lucian, Augustine and Iuvencus. Non-literary material (e.g. inscriptions) will also be considered. Competence levels in the learning group permitting, the translation cultures integrated into this seminar will not be limited to the English sphere but also include non-anglophone traditions. Throughout, broader theoretical and historical perspectives will be combined with hands-on translation analysis. 

Textbook reqd
Pym, A. 2023. Exploring Translation Theories, 3rd edition, London/NY: Routledge. 

CLA5018S Roman Imperialism - C. Bruun

This seminar on Roman history will focus on a much-debated and vast theme from a series of perspectives, which include the history of scholarship; the expansion of Roman power; the explanations, both ancient and modern, for the growth of the Roman state (Roman militarism, economic motives, defensive actions, and more); and the effect of the establishment of the empire both on the population of the heartland and on the provincial indigenous populations. The seminar will cover select parts both of the republican period and of the Principate. The source material to be studied includes literary texts, inscriptions, and material evidence.