Session on Journal Publication with Professor Rosa Andújar

April 17th, 2026, 2:10pm in 613 Hamilton Hall

Emily Mackil

University of California, Berkeley

Credit, Debt, and Servitude in Fourth-Century BCE Halikarnassos

Friday, April 3

11:00 am (ET)

The Italian Academy, 5th floor seminar room

Abstract

This paper presents the findings of a new edition of SEG XLIII 713, a stele inscribed on four sides with records of the sales of property and persons indebted to Apollo, Athena, and Parthenos at Halikarnassos. Long known but poorly understood and little discussed, the text is currently assigned to the astonishingly imprecise period c. 425-350 BCE. This paper explains the stele’s provenance and modern history and provides an overview of the two kinds of transactions recorded on the stone. The new edition sheds fresh light on a set of paratextual signs that had not previously been detected, as well as on the multiple rasurae that mark the stone. The paratextual elements illuminate the process of transforming diverse archival records—originally kept on perishable materials—into a unified epigraphic document. The erasures, by contrast, are best understood in relation to the monument’s symbolic role and to the evolving histories of debt that the stele momentarily fixed in stone. A fuller understanding of the monetary background of the loans recorded here not only allows us to gauge the scale of the credit operations recorded on four sides, but also offers a strong indication that the document should be associated with the synoikism of the city under Maussollos, ca. 375–370 BCE. The document exposes the economic and social precarity induced by certain forms of debt, and appears to record debt servitude, a practice that is occasionally referenced by contemporary literary sources but is poorly understood by historians. More broadly, this text should be part of the emerging history of the economic transformation of western Asia Minor (and its costs) from the very early fourth century onward, but it has not yet been recognized as such.

This event will take place in-person at the Italian Academy (1161 Amsterdam Ave, New York, NY 10027).

For any questions, feel free to get in touch with me at sw3857@columbia.edu. We look forward to seeing you there and to welcoming you to a short reception following the event.

All the best,

Shannon

Ronald Knox, Classical Education, and World War I

Ronald Knox (1888–1957) was one of the most brilliant of a brilliant generation of English classicists. He was also a member of the English generation that was shattered by World War I. As his friends were fighting and dying in France, Knox himself took a leave of absence from his fellowship at an empty Oxford and spent 1915–1916 teaching Classics at Shrewsbury School. In my presentation, I’ll reconstruct Knox’s revolutionary teaching at Shrewsbury and the role that Classics played in giving his life meaning and purpose during the war years. Knox’s approach to the classroom and to Classics still has much to teach us: about Edwardian classical education and classical reception, about pedagogy, and maybe even about life.

We warmly invite you to join us for a Classics Open House on Thursday, February 27th, from 11:30 AM to 1:00 PM in Hamilton 618. Whether you are a curious newcomer or a devoted lover of the ancient world and its reception, this is a wonderful opportunity to connect with fellow students who share your interest in Greek, Latin, Modern Greek, and the civilizations that shaped our present. Come meet the faculty, learn about undergraduate research funding opportunities, and explore our summer courses — from classes here on campus to immersive programs in Athens. We will also be sharing details about our Fall 2026 course offerings, so you can begin planning the road ahead. We hope to see you there.

New Humanities Faculty Salon

Tuesday, February 24

6:00-7:30pm

Uris Hall, Room 107 (Calder Lounge)

Register here.

Please join Division of Humanities Dean Bruno Bosteels in welcoming our newest colleagues from across the division.  

Hosted by the Division of Humanities in the Arts and Sciences, the New Humanities Faculty Salons are an opportunity to meet new faculty members as they join the Columbia Humanities community.  Learn about their current work while you enjoy conversation, drinks, and snacks with faculty and graduate students.  By bringing together scholars from across the Division, we hope to open conversations across the wider Humanities community.  

This February, we welcome:

• Chika Ogura, Lecturer in Japanese Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures   

• Ethan Plaue, Assistant Professor Department of English and Comparative Literature   

• C. Riley Snorton, Professor English and Comparative Literature;  Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender  

• Rosalie Stoner, Assistant Professor Department of Classics

Moderated by:

• Bruno Bosteels, Dean of Humanities; Jesse and George Siegel Professor in the Humanities

Faculty and graduate students from all divisions are welcome to attend.  Wine and snacks will be served. 

Registration is required.  Register here to attend.

Postdoc Work-in-Progress Talk—Steven Brandwood

"Nikias' Delia and Revived Festival Performance”

613 Hamilton Hall 2:10-4p

Jeremiah Coogan (Santa Clara University) will be giving a talk entitled "Textual Orthotics: Galen, Early Christians, and the Politics of Reading." 

The talk will take place this Friday, February 13th, at 4:10 pm in Hamilton 516.

Please note: In order to enter the Columbia campus, you will need either a valid Columbia ID or a guest access QR code.  To receive guest access, please email Melody Wauke (maw2277@columbia.edu) at least two days before the event.

We hope you will be able to join us!

Both before and after vernacular histories of the colonial Americas, the New World was widely read about in Latin. In this talk, I will present and examine the Historia naturalis Brasiliae (1648, “HNB”), a multi-volume Latin treatise on the flora, fauna, and indigenous societies of northeast Brazil, which was under Dutch control between 1630 and 1654. The result of a Dutch imperial network whose officials were invested in Latin learning, the HNB enjoyed wide circulation in northern Europe and beyond, and it was considered as an authoritative treatise until the 19th-century. The widespread assessment that the HNB is an early example of empirical rather than textual methods has influenced the practice of modern scholars, who often mine the text for ethnohistorical insights, sometimes in the hopes of “reconnecting” the information it presents with contemporary indigenous communities. But how and under what conditions was the information compiled in the first place? And why does this matter? I will show that the HNB is rooted in practices of Dutch Latinity, which the authors used as conduits for orienting, systematizing, and supplementing their direct experience of Brazil. The creators of the HNB inventively deployed Greco-Roman literature and taxonomies learned at Leiden University, including Hippocrates’ Airs, waters, places and Pliny’s Natural history, as instruments to communicate the significance of the treatise as well as to channel and delineate information. I will argue that these intellectual conditions undermine a neat picture of empiricism and recontextualize the information presented in the HNB, shedding light on the text as a uniquely Dutch configuration of scientific knowledge at crossroads between the classical tradition, experience, and empire. Attention to the HNB in its intellectual context not only has the potential to illustrate a fundamental episode of the afterlives of ancient authors and their colonial uses; it also offers new avenues to explore the early modern (mis)understanding of the New World, thereby highlighting the relevance of classical studies in the assessment of early modern sources of ethnohistorical information.

Postdoc Work-in-progress talk - Laurens Van der Wiel

613 Hamilton Hall 2:10-4 p.m.

Columbia University will host the Hodie et Cras Symposium on Saturday, January 31, 2026, for a full-day symposium that explores how the ancient world resonates with today. The Hodie et Cras Symposium connects high school students directly with Columbia Classicists through lectures, workshops, and discussions to make Classics accessible, relevant, and alive.

** Please Bring a dictionary and laptop **

For more information, please contact Shante Tucker, Administrative Assistant, at st3516@columbia.edu.

A New World of Latin: Renaissance Humanism and the Early Americas in Peter Martyr’s De orbe novo decades (1511-30)

Before and after vernacular histories of the early Americas, the New World was widely read about in Latin. In this talk, I will present and examine Peter Martyr de Anghiera’s De orbe novo decades (1511-30), the first substantial European history of the New World. Written by an Italian humanist based in Spain, the Decades are an eight-book account that covers events between 1493 and 1524, including the conquest of modern-day Mexico, Cuba, Jamaica, and Guatemala. The Decades were published and republished broadly throughout the early modern period, significantly shaping Europeans’ perceptions of the New World. Despite its relevance, the work is rarely the object of sustained scholarly study, not least because scholars have found it difficult to ascertain Martyr’s methods. He has been seen as writing in a rushed, journalistic style in response to the ever-growing availability of information about the novelties of the Americas. The fact that he entitled his work as “Decades” has also led to the commonplace, yet unexamined, assessment that Martyr wrote following the model of Livy. 

Moving away from these labels, I will argue that the Decades are a humanistic inquiry into American societies that was inspired by, and developed alongside, the humanistic investigation of Mediterranean antiquity and languages. Focusing on the first three Decades, which cover the exploration and conquest of the Caribbean and Central America, I will show that Martyr utilizes Latin both as a linguistic/philological model for approaching and describing indigenous languages and as a guide to making the societies of the Americas legible to his readers. The resulting account is not a surface description but instead an in-depth investigation of the Americas and its indigenous societies. The Decadesinaugurate a tradition of indigenous American philology based on Latin as well as reveal Martyr’s understanding of these indigenous societies’ own antiquity. Attention to Martyr’s work in its intellectual context, I contend, not only has the potential to illustrate a fundamental episode of the afterlives of ancient authors and their colonial uses; it also offers new avenues to explore the early modern understanding of the New World.

NOTE: To access the Columbia campus, you need to have a valid Columbia ID or a guest QR code.  For guest access, please email kv2018@columbia no later than one day before the event.

** Please Bring a dictionary and laptop **

For more information, please contact Shante Tucker, Administrative Assistant, at st3516@columbia.edu.

The Columbia Classics Lecture Series committee is excited to announce the following talk in our series:

Nathaniel Jones (Washington University in St. Louis) will give a talk entitled "Time, Space, and Experientiality on Roman Sarcophagi." Professor Jones has kindly agreed to pre-circulate an abstract, pasted below:

The body presents the principal problematic of the ancient Roman sarcophagus. A sarcophagus is sized to the body which it protects and encloses. It planarizes and stabilizes that body, hiding the inevitable metamorphosis of post-mortem decay behind an ordered and unchanging surface. Many Roman sarcophagi are also decorated with figural sculpture, meaning that their planar surfaces are themselves dissolved into compositions filled with represented bodies, some heroic, some tragic. In this way, the sarcophagus is also a site where the represented and real body come into contact, and in so doing creates a unique form of narrative experientiality. This paper seeks to examine how narrative experientiality functions on sarcophagi, in often surprising ways, to create a reciprocal relationship between viewer and deceased. It examines some well-known phenomena, including biographical and battle sarcophagi, and some lesser-known ones, such as the depiction of mile markers, across a wide range of sarcophagus types, and suggests that the evocation of experientiality may drive formal considerations as much as questions of narrative plot or the apposition of canonical Roman virtues.

The talk will take place on Friday, November 14th, at 4:10 pm in Hamilton 703.

Please note: In order to enter the Columbia campus, you will need either a valid CUID or a guest access QR code. To receive guest access, please email Jazmín Novoa Lara (jan2191@columbia.edu) at least two days before the event.

We hope you will be able to join us!

Join us for our upcoming Open House—a great opportunity to meet fellow students and faculty, connect with our community, and learn more about our exciting new majors and minors. Light brunch will be served, and you’re welcome to drop in for as long as you can—whether just a few minutes or the whole event, we’d love to see you there!

This is a reminder that Cat Lambert (Cornell University) will be giving a talk entitled:

"Scissoring Cavafy: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s ‘artist’s book,’ The Last Days of Pompeii." 

The talk will take place on Tuesday, October 21st at 4:10 pm in Hamilton 516.

Abstract:

Shortly before her death in 2009, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick made a unique ‘artist’s book’ by altering a 1976-edition of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), a novel that framed Pompeii’s fiery destruction as God’s punishment for its inhabitants’ decadent “gaiety” of life. In this paper, I analyze one of the central alterations Sedgwick makes to the book: the collage of 22 excerpts from the poetry of C. P. Cavafy. I argue that Sedgwick performs across this book’s pages a specifically Cavafian poetics of desire and reading. Further, Sedgwick’s Cavafian intervention materializes various threads of her well-known work on reparative reading, challenging the novel’s queer eradicating impulses through a “sustained seeking of pleasure” (Sedgwick 2003: 137).  

Please note: To enter the Columbia campus, you will need either a valid Columbia ID or a guest access QR code. To receive guest access, please email Melody Wauke (maw2277@columbia.edu) at least two days before the event).

We hope you can join us!