The Workshop in Ancient Societies
Faculty and graduate students in Near Eastern Studies, Classics, History, Religious Studies and the Divinity School at Yale share interests in the history and civilization of the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East. The Workshop is a forum which allows a sustained conversation over a semester or even a year about a common theme. In 2011–12 the theme is Historiography in the Ancient World.
The Workshop meets once a month during the school year. The chronological scope of the seminar extends over the first millennium BCE and the early centuries of the common era.
The workshop serves as a crucial forum for getting a focus placed on a sustained dialogue across the ancient fields at Yale. It also builds cross-disciplinarity in the training of all of our graduate students. Our common theme each year allows us all to approach problems and questions from many points of view. This year’s objective is to examine the various ways in which people in the ancient world recorded the past. The last session will be a round-table discussion tying the workshop themes together.
The organizing committee
John J. Collins, Divinity School
Eckart Frahm, Near Eastern Studies
J.G. Manning, Classics/History
The following schedule (2011–2012) is provisional.
All meetings take place in Phelps Hall, Room 207.
- September 2
David Levene, New York University: "Ancient Historiography: A Roman Perspective." - October 7
Mark van de Mieroop, Columbia University: "The Mesopotamians and their Past." - November 4
Colleen Manassa, Dept. of Near Eastern Languages, Yale: "Historiography and Fiction: Imagining the Past in New Kingdom Egypt." - December 2
Robert Wilson, Divinity School, Yale: "The Book of Kings as History and Ideology." - January 13
Christina Kraus, Classics, Yale: "Livian Historiography." - February 3
Mary Frazer, Near Eastern Languages, Yale: "Akkadian Royal Letters in Later Tradition" (ca. 700–100BC) - February 17
Robert Doran, Amherst College: "Second Maccabees as Hellenistic Historiography." - March 2
Thomas Beasley, Classics, Yale: "Thucydides, Rhetoric and Scientific Historiography." - April 1
Review panel: Eckart Frahm, Near Eastern Languages, Harold Attridge, Divinity School, John Matthews, Classics and History.
