Research
The legend of the wife and mother who avenges herself on an unfaithful or abusive husband by murdering their children is one that crosses oceans, boundaries and centuries. Even in antiquity, though Euripides’ Athenian treatment of the myth is the most...
Museum displays can serve to educate and inform the public about various concepts and classes of objects. However, the ways in which these displays present information is typically filtered through selective interpretive lenses that reflect a variety of biases,...
Socrates and the Socratic Dialogue assembles the most complete range of studies on Socrates and the Socratic dialogue. It focuses on portrayals of Socrates, whether as historical figure or protagonist of ‘Socratic dialogues’, in extant and fragmentary texts from...
The influence the Harvard School has had on my scholarship? Among the questions you ask, this is a challenging one indeed, Professor Hejduk, and it comes at an (in)opportune time: I have recently published a monograph on the Aeneid (Stahl 2016, subtitled a Recovery...
The scientific study of ancient human remains reveals important information about life in past societies. Based on careful visual inspection, it is possible to determine the age, sex, stature, and state of health of skeletons, while biomolecular analysis of bone can...
This chapter offers a broad survey of nearly fifty Spanish American receptions (in translation, adaptation, and re-performance) of the seven extant plays of Aeschylus since the nineteenth century. The approach is expository and panoptic, rather than interpretive,...
My paper examined the history and rhetoric of the ancient “Olympic truce” (ekecheiria), which aimed at ensuring safe passage for athletes and spectators to and from the festival of Zeus at Olympia. Conceived on the bloody battlefields of the Peloponnesian War, the...
As part of their presentations in Classics 1610 ("Greek Archaeology"), this year's Pitt in Sicily students created 360° videos at sites around the island. You can view the videos on YouTube by searching "Pitt in Sicily", or simply clicking ...
Prof. Smethurst spoke about the history of performances of Greek tragedy in Japan with a focus on the productions of “Trojan Women” and “Medea” by Suzuki Tadashi, Ninagawa Yukio, and Miyagi Satoshi.
A great distance―spatial, temporal, and cultural―stretches between fifth - century BCE Greece and the fourteenth/fifteenth-century CE Japan, when the best-known writers of tragedy（Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides）and of noh（Kan’ami, Zeami, and Zenchiku）created...
Proclus (412-485 A.D.) was one of the last official "successors" of Plato at the head of the Academy in Athens at the end of Antiquity, before the school was finally closed down in 529. As a prolific author of systematic works on a wide range of topics and one of...
Dr. Korzeniewski's talk discussed the maturation of Venus in the Aeneid and her coming to accept Aeneas’ fated destiny. The full conference program may be found here.
In recent decades, international research on Virgil has been marked, if not dominated, by the ideas of the 'Harvard school' and similar trends, according to which the poet was engaged in an elaborate work of subtle subversion, directed against the new ruler of the...
‘Dark tourism’ is generally defined as travel to sites associated with suffering, death, or the macabre. In the modern world, popular dark tourism destinations include bloody battlefields such as Gallipoli and Waterloo, sites of disaster like Chernobyl and the World...
Virginia Magazine turned to U.Va. academics from six disciplines and asked them how each of their respective fields interprets the supernatural—spirits, visions, the undead and more: Archaeologists generally agree that the ancient Greeks believed in things that we...
Sicily was among one of the first areas settled during the Greek colonization movement, making its cemeteries a popular area of study for scholars of the classical world. Yet these studies have often considered human remains and burial customs separately. In this...
For the ancient Greeks, the dead were subjects of both fear and supplication. Necrophobia, or the fear of the dead, is a concept that has been present in Greek culture since the Neolithic period. At the heart of this phobia is the belief that corpses are able to...
With the exception of extispicy scenes catalogued by Francois Lissarrague and snake-eagle omens discussed by Diana Rodríguez Pérez, divination has been ignored by vase-painting scholars and of ancient religion scholars, only Michael Flower has touched on visual...
The problem of responsibility in moral philosophy has been lively debated in the last decades, especially since the publication of Harry Frankfurt's seminal paper, "Alternate possibilities and moral responsibility" (1969). Compatibilists - also known as "soft"...
Death can be an uncomfortable subject. Yet, much of what we know about ancient societies comes from funerary contexts, making discussions of death in the classroom unavoidable. Indeed elements of religion and the supernatural (itself a difficult topic), the funeral...
Excavations at Punta Secca, Sicily (Italy), in 2008 uncovered a substantially built tomb of ca ad 625/630 inside a private house and accompanying evidence for libations and funerary feasting in honour of the deceased. Inside the tomb were the skeletal remains of an...