This is the required proseminar for first-year graduate students in Classical Studies and Ancient History. It offers an up-to-date orientation to the professional academic fields conventionally known as classical studies and ancient history. The course is responsive to present debates within, and about, these fields.

Intensive Latin reading course for students in the Post-Baccalaureate Program in Classical Studies. Readings are chosen to expose students to a variety of prose and poetry texts during their program experience. The Fall course includes some grammar review and analysis as well as translation. Permission of instructor required for non-Post-Baccalaureate students.

Intensive Latin reading course for students in the Post-Baccalaureate Program in Classical Studies. Readings are chosen to expose students to a variety of prose and poetry texts during their program experience. The Fall course includes some grammar review and analysis as well as translation. Permission of instructor required for non-Post-Baccalaureate students.

Intensive Greek reading course for students in the Post-Baccalaureate Program in Classical Studies. Readings are chosen to expose students to a variety of prose and poetry texts during their program experience. The Fall course includes some grammar review and analysis as well as translation. Permission of instructor required for non-Post-Baccalaureate students.

Intensive Greek reading course for students in the Post-Baccalaureate Program in Classical Studies. Readings are chosen to expose students to a variety of prose and poetry texts during their program experience. The Fall course includes some grammar review and analysis as well as translation. Permission of instructor required for non-Post-Baccalaureate students.

Students in this course will be exposed to the broad spectrum of digital approaches in archaeology with an emphasis on fieldwork, through a survey of current literature and applied learning opportunities that focus on African American mortuary landscapes of greater Philadelphia. As an Academically Based Community Service (ABCS) course, we will work with stakeholders from cemetery companies, historic preservation advocacy groups, and members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church to collect data from three field sites. We will then use these data to reconstruct the original plans, untangle site taphonomy, and assess our results for each site. Our results will be examined within the broader constellation of threatened and lost African American burial grounds and our interpretations will be shared with community stakeholders using digital storytelling techniques. This course can count toward the minor in Digital Humanities, minor in Archaeological Science and the Graduate Certificate in Archaeological Science.

The peoples of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds shared a vast body of stories about human and not-human beings set in a legendary deep past or supernatural present - "Classical myth." Even their neighbor cultures took up those stories (or, sometimes, gave them). The stories as spoken, read, or performed turn up in surviving ancient literature. But from the very point when Greek myth began to be written down, those stories were told with images also. Many arts of the Mediterranean world explored myth at temples and sanctuaries, in civic spaces, theaters, parks, houses and palaces, for tombs and trophies - and even on the body upon weapons, clothes and jewelry. Love and desire and hate, hope and fear and consolation, war and peace, pleasure and excitement, power and salvation, the nature of this world and the cosmos, justice and duty and heroism, fate and free will, suffering and crime: mythological images probed the many domains of being human in order to move the emotions and minds of people (and of gods). Our class samples this story art to ask about its makers and viewers and contexts. What, also, were relations between images and texts and language? What about religious belief vs invention, truth vs fiction? What might it mean to look at this ancient art today, and to represent the old stories in post-ancient cultures? The class introduces ways of thinking about what images and things do; we will read in some relevant literature (drama, epic, novels, etc); and our Penn Museum will be a resource. No prerequisites--no prior knowledge of art history, archaeology, myth or Mediterranean antiquity is assumed.

The Mediterranean environment is both diverse and unique, and nurtured numerous complex societies along its shores in antiquity. This seminar offers a primer on theoretical and methodological approaches to studying landscapes and seascapes of the Mediterranean from the Bronze Age to the early modern era, at scales from local to international and on land and underwater. Concepts from processual, post-processual, and current archaeologies will be considered, and field techniques including excavation and surface survey, remote sensing and geophysics, GIS modeling, and ethnography/ethnoarchaeology are examined. Course content and discussion focus on case studies that illustrate how these tools are used to reconstruct the appearance and resources of the natural environment; overland and maritime routes; settlement location, size, function, and demography; social and economic networks; and agricultural, pastoral, and nomadic lifeways. Seminar participants will develop case studies of their own geographical and chronological interest.

An intensive exploration of Rome's urban topography during the Republican and Imperial periods (6th c. B.C. through 4th c. A.D.) Using archaeological and textual sources, including the Etruscan and Roman collections of the Penn Museum, the goal will be to reconstruct the built environment and decoration of Rome over the course of a millennium. Of interest to students of classics, archaeology, art history, and architecture. Some familiarity with Rome will be a plus, but is not required.

How is it that we in the 21st century are able to read the philosophy of Plato, the Odyssey of Homer, or histories of Caesar? What technological, economic, and social processes made this possible? How did papyrus, parchment, printing, and paper all pave the way to the e-book? What can the physical remains of the words of the past tell us about culture, memory, and interpretation? This course teaches undergraduate students the history of the book by focusing on the material transmission of literature from the ancient Mediterranean (areas occupied by modern Egypt, Turkey, Greece, Algeria, and Italy, among others) to the present day. Readings will include both excerpts of ancient literature (in English translation) and contemporary scholarship. Students will learn how literature was produced in antiquity, how publication has changed over time, and how reading practices have developed in tandem with the changes in format from papyrus to pixels.