This Critical-Creative Seminar will explore the genre-defying work of classicist, poet, and essayist Anne Carson, writing creatively to form critical understanding and honing critical interpretations to enhance creative writing. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

The writers of ancient Greece and Rome speak of love in ways that are immediately familiar to us, but also in ways that are hard for us to understand. Some of their attitudes differ from one another, and we can even see the Romans learning about Greek attitudes and consciously adopting them, or pretending to. The same process of learning about and adopting, both consciously and unconsciously, inform our own ideas about love and related phenomena, such a friendship, loyalty, jealousy, and possessiveness. The course will acquaint students with some lesser-known literature and reacquaint them with more familiar works from a new point of view. We will emphasize discussion in class and in supplementary small groups as analytical tools.

This is a course on the history of literary theory, a survey of major debates about literature, poetics, and ideas about what literary texts should do, from ancient Greece to examples of modern European thought. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

This lecture course surveys the political, religious and domestic arts, patronage and display in Rome's Mediterranean, from the 2nd c. BCE to Constantine's 4th-c. Christianized empire. Our subjects are images and decorated objects in their cultural, political and socio-economic contexts (painting, mosaic, sculpture, luxury and mass-produced arts in many media). We start with the Hellenistic cosmopolitan culture of the Greek kingdoms and their neighbors, and late Etruscan and Republican Italy; next we map Imperial Roman art as developed around the capital city Rome, as well as in the provinces of the vast empire.

Heritage is always political. Such a statement might refer to the everyday politics of local stakeholder interests on one end of the spectrum, or the volatile politics of destruction and erasure of heritage during conflict, on the other. If heritage is always political then one might expect that the workings of World Heritage might be especially fraught given the international dimension. In particular, the intergovernmental system of UNESCO World Heritage must navigate the inherent tension between state sovereignty and nationalist interests and the wider concerns of a universal regime. The World Heritage List has almost 1200 properties has many such contentious examples, including sites in Iraq, Mali, Syria, Crimea, Palestine, Armenia and Cambodia. As an organization UNESCO was born of war with an explicit mission to end global conflict and help the world rebuild materially and morally yet has found its own history increasingly entwined with that of international politics and violence.

In ancient times, materials such as stone and metals were used to produce artifacts including pigments, jewelry, tools, and weapons. This course is designed to introduce students to research on the early exploitation of mineral resources. Which techniques were used to access and process raw materials in antiquity? Which archaeological methods can be used to investigate these features and artifacts? The course will provide worldwide examples through time, ranging from Stone Age flint mining, Iron Age rock salt mining to Medieval silver mining. Ethnographic studies and hands-on activities will contribute to our understanding of mining in archaeology, and artifacts from the Museum's collections will undergo scientific analysis in the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials.

By focusing on the scientific analysis of archaeological remains from organic materials, this course will explore life and death in the past. Plant and animal remains from the archaeological record are studied from a variety of scales from landscapes and individual objects. The course uses laboratories in the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials (CAAM) at the Penn Museum. Each module will combine laboratory and classroom exercises to give students hands-on experience with archaeological materials. We will examine how organic materials provide key information about past environments, the domestication of plants and animals, and the evolution of human foods and their environmental impacts. We will integrate archaeological data through discussions of topics such as health and disease, inequality, and traditional ecological knowledge. We will also discuss current approaches in archaeological science, including molecular and genomic studies, to explore the complex ways in which humans have interacted with plants and animals over time.

This seminar examines the archaeology of Greek colonization from the Late Bronze Age to ca. 500 B.C. These colonies were highly diverse in their motivations, physical settings, and political and social structures, as well as in their relationships with mother cities and the new worlds they inhabited. Emphasis is placed on the colonial experience as a cross-cultural and negotiated process; several streams of the changing theoretical and conceptual approaches to Greek colonization are explored. In addition to archaeological and epigraphic evidence, literary and historical traditions are examined. Colonies from the southern Balkan peninsula, Black Sea, Ionia, northern Africa, and Magna Graecia will be the focus of reading and reports.

This class is designed as a detailed investigation of the world created by Alexander the Great. We will cover the three hundred year period known as the Hellenistic Age from the career of Alexander the Great (354-323 BC) until the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium (31 BC). This was a period during which the world of the Greeks underwent extraordinary and far-reaching changes, as Greek culture was established as far afield as northwestern India, central Asia and Egypt. In the same period kingdoms controlled by Alexanders's Successors used Greek culture to define their rule, establishing a Greek culture of the elite in regions which previously had been dominated by the Persians. As Greek and non-Greek worlds collided, a new interpretation of Greek culture emerged, giving rise, among other things, to universities and professional schools, state subsidized health care, triumphalist architecture, the heroization of the noble savage, coinage with royal portraits, the deification of men and a multitude of other social, artistic and political forms familiar to us. It was an age of radical change, dislocation, as Greek populations colonized regions previously unkown to them.

A broad consideration of the ways in which writers and artists from the early modern era to the present day have responded to the classical tradition, borrowing from, imitating, questioning, and challenging their classical predecessors. Through modern reworkings of ancient epic, tragedy, biography, and lyric by authors ranging from Shakespeare and Racine to contemporary poets, painters, and filmmakers, we will ask what the terms "classical" and "tradition" might mean and will track the continuities and differences between antiquity and the modern world. Should we see ancient Greek and Roman culture as an inheritance, a valuable source of wealth bequeathed to the modern age? Or is there something wrong with that picture? How do ancient texts have to be adapted and transformed if they are to speak to modern conditions and concerns? This is an introductory-level course open to anyone who cares about the relationship between the present and the past.