Professor Allison Glazebrook has received the 2023 Faculty of Humanities Award for Excellence in Research and Creative Activity (https://brocku.ca/humanities/research/award-for-excellence/). This Brock award recognizes a consistent track record of outstanding research or creative achievements appropriate to the nominee’s discipline. Congratulations Dr. Glazebrook for this impressive recognition!
Brock faculty and alumni were well-represented at this year’s Annual Meeting of the Classical Association of Canada, held May 10-12 in Halifax, NS. Conference information and the full program is available here. Don’t miss next year’s annual meeting in Laval!
Allison Glazebrook and Angus Smith represented the faculty with their papers:
Rodney Fitzsimons, Trent University, Matthew Buell, Jane Francis, Concordia University, and R.A.K. Smith, Brock University, “Canadians at Aghios Nikolaos Again: Report of the Khavania Archaeological Project, 2022.”
Allison Glazebrook, Brock University, “The Importance of Place: Athenian Women in the Polis.”
Our alumni were visible giving papers and organizing panels:
Jeff Masse, University of Toronto, gave a paper, “On the Distributed Agency of Arrows in the Homeric Poems” in a session organized by Simone Mollard, McMaster University, Catherine Tracy, Bishop’s University, and Christina Vester, University of Waterloo.
Two M.A. alumni were featured in a panel organized by the Graduate Student Caucus and chaired by Victoria Muccilli and Simone Mollard:
Jazz Demetrioff, University at Buffalo, “Calling all Doctors: The Hand vs. the Practitioner.”
Stephanie Dennie, University of Western Ontario, “Attic Drama as A Starting Point: Using Sophocles’ Antigone as an introduction to interdisciplinary learning in a co-taught class for Theatre Studies and Community Psychology.”
We love to celebrate the stories of our alumni, in the field or far beyond. Please drop us a note if you have any news to share.
Don’t miss M.A. student Sarah Murray’s paper in the Brock Review, “Erasing the Future: The Treatment of Children by the Romans in the Aftermath of Battle.” Originally written in a course on Disasters in the Ancient World taught by Dr. Fanny Dolansky, Murray’s paper explores the separation of families and the fate of children in the aftermath of battle, as preserved in the historical and monumental record. The essay was also awarded a prize in the Classical Association of Canada’s senior level essay competition. Congratulations, Sarah Murray!
Kudos to Prof. Dolansky for her chapter “Belief and ideology” in A Cultural History of Youth in Antiquity. The volume, edited by C. Laes and V. Vuolanto was recently published by Bloomsbury and belongs to a series on the history of youth.
According to a press release on the volume from the University of Manchester:
Young women, sub-elite young people and cultures that are often overlooked in history books are given a platform, and it is the first book volume ever to examine congenital, intellectual disability in the ancient world. The contributions cover the ancient Near East, Egypt, the Graeco-Roman world, ancient China, the rabbinic tradition, Byzantium, the Islamic world and the Middle Ages in the Latin West. “For too long, the ancient world has been studied somewhat in isolation to other periods of history,” said Prof Dr Laes. “The engaging and thought-provoking chapters combine careful textual analysis with attention to the material evidence and comparative perspectives, not the least those offered by disability history for recent periods in history.”
Dolansky’s chapter offers a broad picture of young people’s independent and collective religious activities in the ancient Mediterranean world, concentrating in particular on male and female youth in Classical Greece and late Republican and Imperial Rome. She also draws on select examples from Judaism and late antique Christianity. Literary authors less commonly examined in studies of youth, such as the Augustan poet Grattius and the travel writer Pausanias, are integrated with more traditional sources such as Horace and Livy to capture ritual activity that took place in diverse locales involving a wide range of participants. Additionally, epigraphic evidence sheds light on individuals of both sexes who were lower on the socio-economic scale and actively engaged in religion both as individuals and in groups.
Don’t miss the current episode of Foreword, in which Brock Classics M.A. alumna, Alison Innes, interviews Prof. Fanny Dolansky about childhood in ancient Rome.
Please click here to listen to the podcast.
What was life like for children in ancient Rome? How did Romans think about the idea of family? And why should we bother studying Latin in the 21st century? Our guest this episode is Dr. Fanny Dolansky, Associate Professor with the Department of Classics and Archaeology. She shares how she became interested in Roman history, her work on childhood and Roman religion, and how the pandemic has presented her with new avenues of research.
Foreword introduces the study of arts, culture, and society and explores how research in the Humanities helps us understand our world today. Topics include history, English, modern languages, literature, ancient history, archaeology, game studies, technology, fine and performing arts, philosophy, Canadian studies, and more.
In the summer of 2023, the Department of Classics & Archaeology will offer CLAS/VISA 3M23 Study Tour of Greece. Students will spend 2-3 weeks touring the archaeological sites and museums of Greece to learn first-hand about the history and culture of the ancient Greek world. To express interest, and for updates and more information about the application process, please fill out the brief online form at: https://forms.office.com/r/0Td8VaVk0f
Drawing on her research interests in Roman domestic religion, Fanny Dolansky recently published a chapter titled “Religion and Divination at Court” in The Roman Emperor and His Court, c. 30 BC – AD 300, a volume of essays that explores aspects of court life and interactions between emperors and their courtiers in imperial Rome. She has also contributed several entries to a chapter on “Rituals and ceremonial” in the accompanying sourcebook volume where she examines literary and visual evidence for the participation of the emperor and his court, including members of the imperial family, in religious rituals such as the toga virilis ceremony to mark freeborn boys’ coming of age and the Saturnalia, a major year-end festival celebrated in December.
Learn more on the publisher’s website.
On March 1, Fanny Dolansky presented a lecture, “Religion at Court” at Caesar’s Palace: Inside the Court of Early Imperial Rome, a symposium at the Royal Ontario Museum. The symposium aimed to reassess the Roman court – often imagined as a world of luxury, intrigue, and murder – using archaeological and textual evidence to explore the court’s importance for the exercise and presentation of power in Ancient Rome. The event website can be found here.
On February 20-21, Elizabeth Greene, Richard Leventhal, Justin Leidwanger and Brian Daniels co-organized a workshop: Memory, Movement, Materiality: Journeys of Forced and Undocumented Migration, featuring a keynote event by artist Michael Rakowitz. The workshop, which explored the materiality of passages, past and present, of forced and undocumented migration, was sponsored by the Perry World House and the Penn Cultural Heritage Center at the University of Pennsylvania. It provided an opportunity for an international group of archaeologists, museum professionals, artists, and policy makers to consider ongoing questions of human movement in a contemporary light.
Draft executive order for U.S. federal architecture alarms Brock experts
Classics Department professor Katharine von Stackelberg offered her opinion on the meaning of Neoclassical architecture in the Brock News:
The neoclassical style developed new meanings in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a result of education reforms, journalism and mass-produced art, says von Stackleberg, whose edited volume, Housing the New Romans: Architectural Reception and Classical Style in the Roman World (Oxford, 2017; co-edited with E. Macaulay-Lewis) traces this shift in the meaning.
“Neoclassical style came to represent femininity, domestic leisure and hybrid ‘foreignness’ when access to classics became available to previously marginalized groups such as women, working-class families and immigrants.”
