Colloquia and Events

Unless otherwise noted, all Colloquia will take place at 4:30 p.m. in Room B21 of the Rhys Carpenter Library on the campus of Bryn Mawr College. Tea will be held at 4 p.m. in the Quita Woodward Room, Old Library. For information call 610-526-5083; or email llawrence@brynmawr.edu. * if noted with an asterisk the announcement is not a colloquia but a special event. Please read event for location.

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Fall 2025 Classics Colloquia

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Friday, September 5

Matthew C. Farmer

Haverford College

“The Comic City”

 

^{Carpenter Library B-21}

^{4:30 pm - 5:30 pm}

^{Bryn Mawr College}

^{Tea at 4 pm in the Quita Woodward Room}

^{Click here to watch the Zoom event recording.} 

In this talk I read across the fragments of Greek Old Comedy to build up a picture of the world of the comic city: children playing street games, elders grumbling in the marketplace, courtesans drinking with Heracles. These fragments also allow us to look beyond the comic city's imperialist present and into its utopian past, to a time without slavery, hunger, poverty, or work. In addition to textual fragments, I'll pay particular attention to a set of South Italian vase paintings that wonderfully expand our view of the comic city and its inhabitants.

 

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Friday, September 12

Reports From The Field: News from Abroad

 

^{Carpenter Library B-21}

^{4:30 pm - 5:30 pm}

^{Bryn Mawr College}

^{Tea at 4 pm in the Quita Woodward Room}

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Friday, September 19

Marsha McCoy

Southern Methodist University 

"Mabel Lang and Bryn Mawr: A Greek Professor and Her Students"

 

^{Carpenter Library B-21}

^{4:30 pm - 5:30 pm}

^{Bryn Mawr College}

^{Tea at 4 pm in the Quita Woodward Room}

Click here to watch the Zoom event recording.

Mabel Lang (1917-2010) taught baby Greek to generations of Bryn Mawr students over the course of her career, which she spent entirely at Bryn Mawr, from 1943 until her retirement in 1991. She introduced her students to Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, and even the mysteries of Linear B. Her knowledge was encyclopedic, reflecting her excavation work and publications from the Palace of Nestor and the Athenian Agora, as well as her ground-breaking research on Herodotus and Thucydides. She directed many senior essays as well as doctoral dissertations, and was a supportive mentor to students both during their college years and afterwards, as they ventured into graduate school and their own careers. She left her imprint on every student she taught, and she represents Bryn Mawr teaching at its finest.    

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Friday, September 26

Bronwen Wikkiser

Hunter College, CUNY 

"λίθοι ὑγιεῖς: A medical vocabulary for architecture"

 

^{Carpenter Library B-21}

^{4:30 pm - 5:30 pm}

^{Bryn Mawr College}

^{Tea at 4 pm in the Quita Woodward Room}

^{Click here to watch the Zoom event recording.}

This talk investigates the phrase “healthy stones” (λίθοι ὑγιεῖς) as it occurs in inscribed building accounts of the late classical and early Hellenistic periods in Attica, Delos, and Boeotia. Most instances of its use are from sanctuary contexts, and we will begin our investigation on the Acropolis of Athens. Some questions we will consider are: What did “healthy” mean more broadly to the Greeks, and what might it have meant when applied specifically to building blocks and other objects within sanctuaries? Are there any patterns to the chronological and geographic range of the occurrence of the locution “healthy stones”? Furthermore, did this phrase occur in association with particular cults or gods?

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Friday, October 3

Manuela Marai

University of Warwick

"Galen’s Science of Wound Treatment"

 

^{Carpenter Library B-21}

^{4:30 pm - 5:30 pm}

^{Bryn Mawr College}

^{Tea at 4 pm in the Quita Woodward Room}

^{Click here to watch the Zoom event recording.}

The Greek physician Galen of Pergamon (129–216 CE) stands as one of the most influential figures in the history of medicine. His prolific writings have long attracted scholarly attention from philosophical, philological, rhetorical, and sociocultural perspectives, reflecting the remarkable breadth of knowledge preserved in his texts. Yet the scientific reasoning underlying his medical practice has often receded into the background—partly due to concerns about anachronism and the challenge of disentangling practical methods from the intellectual and cultural frameworks in which they were embedded. This paper explores ways of engaging with the “actual science” of ancient medicine and considers why such an approach remains valuable. Using Galen’s treatment of wounds as a case study, I examine his understanding of wound pathology and the logic behind his pharmacological interventions: the selection of substances, their combinations, and their preparation. I argue that experimental engagement with ancient medical techniques can both yield scientific insight into the rational basis of certain remedies and function as a form of “practical exegesis” (Rampling, 2014), enabling a deeper reading of ancient medical texts through hands-on interaction with the practices and materials they describe.

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Friday, October 24

Dr. Justine McConnell

King's College London

“Stitching the Odyssey Anew in Tayari Jones' An American Marriage”

 

^{Carpenter Library B-21}

^{4:30 pm - 5:30 pm}

^{Bryn Mawr College}

^{Tea at 4 pm in the Quita Woodward Room}

^{Click here to watch the Zoom event recording.}

Tayari Jones’ novel An American Marriage (2018) ‘re-visions’ Homer’s Odyssey in the context of twenty-first-century America and the persistence of what Michelle Alexander has termed ‘the new Jim Crow’. The Odyssean intertext is only one of many threads within the narrative, but through it, Jones goes beyond creating space for the female voice or inverting the gender roles of ancient epic. Rather, alert to the oppressive nature of silencing, she creates space and voice for wife, husband, and suitor alike, and recasts Penelope’s weaving as an empowered action. While Homer’s ‘reverse similes’ give the audience fleeting glimpses of an imagined gender equality, Jones’ novel actualises that equality, and as the characters carve out their narratives in the face of a racialized criminal justice system, their stories stand as acts of resistance.

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Friday, October 31

Timothy Whitmarsh

Cambridge University

"Epic Reformed: The “New Poets” of Christian Byzantium"

 

^{Carpenter Library B-21}

^{4:30 pm - 5:30 pm}

^{Bryn Mawr College}

^{Tea at 4 pm in the Quita Woodward Room}

^{Click here to watch the Zoom event recording.}

The fifth century CE is arguably the era of classical antiquity from which we have the most surviving poetry. Why is this? What was it about this most theologically and morally decadent of pagan poetic forms that appealed to late antique Christians? This paper explores this question from the perspective of form (that most charged of modern literary-critical terms). At one level, Byzantine Greeks drew a sharp line between pagan poetic form and Christian content. But sharp lines never hold for long; it was in part the risky contagiousness of epic form that constituted its allure.

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Friday, November 7

Jinyu Liu

Emory University 

"Tempus in Ovid’s Exile Poetry: Conceptualizing and Narrating Time at the Edge of the Empire"

 

^{Carpenter Library B-21}

^{4:30 pm - 5:30 pm}

^{Bryn Mawr College}

^{Tea at 4 pm in the Quita Woodward Room}

^{Click here to watch the Zoom event recording.}

This paper explores how Ovid’s exile to Tomis on the Black Sea in 8 CE alters how he experiences, conceptualizes, and narrates time. I argue that “time” in his exile poetry is just as complex as in the Fasti, but it serves as a different kind of subversive commentary that highlights the limits or absence of universality in “Roman” time and order. If “time” is both a manifestation of order and a mechanism to reinforce that order, Ovid’s life in Tomis at the edge of the Roman Empire is portrayed as a challenge to the Augustan/Roman order. In his exile poetry, “time” is characterized by ongoing tensions between the effort to track time and the various disruptions to its rhythms, between the recollection of collective time linked to public life and the erasure of politically marked time, as well as between the hope for eternal future time and the uncertain, slow passage of time in the present. "Time," therefore, acts as a discursive stand-in not only for the poet’s personal hardship but also for the confined scope of the Roman Empire. Political and imperial time are examined in contrast to natural, agricultural, poetic, and cosmic time.

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Friday, November 14

C. Densmore Curtis Lecture at Bryn Mawr College

John Ma

Columbia University

"From an Elephantine Jar: Gender, Marriage and Sex in early Hellenistic Egypt" 

 

Martin Ostwald Lecture at Swarthmore College

Richard Saller

Stanford University

"Pliny’s Natural History and the Quest for Comprehensive Knowledge" 

 

^{Carpenter Library B-21}

^{4:30 pm - 5:30 pm}

^{Bryn Mawr College}

^{Tea at 4 pm in the Quita Woodward Room}

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Friday, November 21

Ifigenia Giannadaki

University of Florida

"Athenian Metics and the Law: Legal ‘Isolation’ or Political Inclusion?"

 

^{Carpenter Library B-21}

^{4:30 pm - 5:30 pm}

^{Bryn Mawr College}

^{Tea at 4 pm in the Quita Woodward Room}

^{Click here to watch the Zoom event recording.}

Modern scholarly consensus has it that metics were ‘isolated’ figures in litigation in democratic Athens, a view argued by Patterson (2000), while other scholars consider metics as closer to slaves than to citizens in the Athenian legal system (e.g. Kennedy 2025). More specifically, Patterson’s study expresses serious doubts about metics’ ability to exercise their legal rights in action in Athens. This lecture—stemming out of my current major project on metics in Athens at the Center for Hellenic Studies (Harvard), focuses on key forensic orations which involve both metic males and females in court, and argues that metics were not ‘isolated’ figures in the Athenian justice system. As the evidence shows, they were entitled to certain ‘political’ rights in democratic procedures, rights which citizens themselves held. Yet, this is not to suggest that metics’ legal rights in the private and public spheres brought them closer to the citizen group in legal terms. Athenian law safeguarded the status boundaries between citizens and non-citizens, but the evidence reveals complex social networks which metics living in Athens were part of. Those diverse networks offered support to metics in litigation in the private and public spheres, unlike what has become the modern ‘orthodoxy’ in the study of metic legal rights in 4th c. Athens.

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Friday, December 5

Jens Fischer

Universität Potsdam

"Mediated Authority – Rethinking Ancient Greek Pseudepigraphy as a Discursive Phenomenon"

 

^{Carpenter Library B-21}

^{4:30 pm - 5:30 pm}

^{Bryn Mawr College}

^{Tea at 4 pm in the Quita Woodward Room}

^{Click here to watch the Zoom event recording.}

In ancient Greece, numerous poems existed whose authorship was attributed by their actual composers to mythical or at least semi-mythical figures in order to enhance their religious authority. The most well-known examples are the diverse texts attributed to Orpheus and the oracles of the Sibyls. Somewhat less familiar, however, are figures such as the singer Musaeus, the seer Bakis, or the purification priest Epimenides, to name just a few. Additionally, some of the oracles of the Delphic Pythia, as they appear in other sources, must under certain conditions also be included in this category of texts. Scholarly approaches to these texts have at times diverged significantly, even though modern researchers frequently emphasize their many points of overlap and commonality. This talk will explore the extent to which this type of text can be understood as a coherent and interconnected phenomenon. The focus will be on the role these texts played within a wide range of contemporary discourses, in which they were employed—albeit in often very different ways—as means of asserting authority.

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Friday, December 12

End of Term Graduate Group Talks