Spring 2022: “Digital Humanties for the Premodern World”
Spring 2021: Law and History, Law in History
HIST 513/RLST 619/CLSS 872/MDVL 513/NELC 683
Maria Doerfler and Travis Zadeh (Religious Studies).
This seminar invites students into a comparative exploration of the intersection of law, history, and historiography in the ancient and premodern world. Sessions explore these links across a variety of linguistic and geographic settings, including those of ancient and medieval India, China, Persia, Greece, and Rome, as well as in different political, religious, literary, and archaeological contexts. The seminar constructs the category of law expansively to encompass civic, religious, and hybrid forms of legislation. In the process, we seek to explore, inter alia, questions of the relevance of history for the study of law, history’s deployment in the context of legal writings, and law’s concomitant relevance for historiography; the use of theoretical models, including those forged in modern and postmodern contexts, for the study of law and legal historiography; and the implications of discourses about law and history in premodernity for contemporary, post-secular societies.
Spring 2021: Historical Sociolinguistics in the Ancient World”
NELC 668/CLSS 829/LING 668
Kevin van Bladel (NELC)
Spring 2019: Sensory Experiences in Ancient Ritual
ANTH 531 / ARCG 531 / CLSS 815 / EALL 773 / HIST 502/HSAR 564 / JDST 653 / NELC 533 / RLST 803
Carolyn Laferriere, Archaia Postdoctoral associate, History of Art
This class will undertake a comparative exploration of the role the senses played in the performance of ancient and premodern ritual, drawing from a range of ancient traditions including those of Greece, Rome, and Egypt, and from cultural traditions of the Near East, India, China, and the New World. Placing particular emphasis on the relationship between art and ritual, we discuss the methods available for reconstructing ancient sensory experience, how the ancient cultures conceived of the senses and perception, and how worshipers’ sensory experiences, whether visual, sonic, olfactory, gustatory, or haptic, were integral aspects in their engagement with the divine within religious ritual. This seminar incorporates material in the Yale Art Gallery.
Spring 2018: Slavery, Dependency, and Genocide in the Ancient and Premodern World
ARCG 531 01 (22150) / CPLT547 / ANTH531 / CLSS815 / JDST653 / HIST502 / RLST803 / NELC533
Ben Kiernan (History) and Noel Lenski (Classics and History)
Slavery is one among many forms of human repression. It stands out for at least three reasons. First, it renders its subjects ‘socially dead’, forced to live beyond the bounds of group inclusion, for all that they enjoy physical intimacy with the dominant group. Second, it does so using violence, which it doles out in a measured and carefully calibrated manner in order to assert dominance while postponing death indefinitely. Third, it borrows the epistemology of the peculiarly human institution of property, which it applies by analogy to humans in order to render them objects under the dominial control of a master. This combination of factors has profound consequences on their labor, their productivity, their economic value, their sexuality, their physicality, their spirituality, their options of self-actualization, their lifespan, the circumstances of their mortality, the horizons of their every expectation. We will explore the paradox of this ‘peculiar institution’ in a premodern context using the broadest possible lens – both as regards chronology and geography, and as regards the semantic field covered by the word ‘slave’ (and its culturally variant lexemes). Beginning from the principle of slavery as a form of postponed mortality, we enter discussions of genocide and mass killing. Ending with the principle of human property, we also explore relations of dependency that might not be considered slavery by some – serfdom, helotage, colonate, nobis. Over the course of the semester we will explore slavery, dependency and genocide in premodern Assyrian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Islamic, Han, Germanic, Angkorian, Vietnamese, Burmese, Malay, Mayan, Aztec and precolonial African cultures.
Spring 2017: Fakes, Forgeries, and the Making of Antiquity
ARCG 531, CLSS 815/ CPLT 547/ HIST 502/ JDST 653/ NELC 533/ RLST 803
Eckart Frahm (NELC) and Irene Peirano Garrison (Classics)
The seminar will be a comparative exploration of notions of forgery and authenticity in the ancient and premodern world, in a variety of civilizations (ancient Greece, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Israel, China, India, etc.) and different political, religious, literary, and artistic contexts. Emphasis will also be placed on the pivotal role played by the “authentic” in the modern era in disciplines such as philology and aesthetics, the manipulative uses of ancient history for purposes of modern nation building and identity formation, copies and reconstructions of ancient artifacts, and the role of forgeries in today’s antiquities trade.
Spring 2016: Frontiers and Provinces in the Premodern World
CLSS 841/ ANTH 741/ARCG 741 HIST 502/ NELC 841
William Honeychurch (Anthropology) and Andrew Johnston (Classics)
From Achaemenid India or Han China to Roman Gaul and Egypt to Iraqi Kurdistan, the province and its organizational equivalents (e.g., nomes in Egypt, commanderies in China) have long constituted one of the fundamental building blocks of states, ancient and modern, and a fascinatingly complex site of cultural and political negotiation in imperial encounters. The aim of this year’s core seminar is to explore social equilibria between governance and the governed in the premodern world, via the interaction—religious, artistic, linguistic, administrative, economic—between local units and large imperial frameworks. As an object of comparative study, the province, representing the intersection of imperial power and local communities, allows us to combine “top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches to the ancient world, to investigate some of the key practices and discourses of empire while attempting to recover the agency and voices of subaltern provincial actors. It offers as well a chance to reconsider the “center-periphery” paradigm taken over from world-systems theory, and to propose new models for understanding the complex relationships between an imperial “center” and the governance of territories.
This interdisciplinary seminar examines a wide range of aspects of the province as a transhistorical phenomenon—law, economy, art, literature, religion, monumentality, urbanism, and politics—across the ancient Mediterranean world and beyond, making use of the unique resources and collections at Yale, especially the Art Gallery and Beinecke Library.
Spring 2015: Commentary: Theory and Practice
CPLT 923/ JDST 650/ NELC 650/ RLST 645
Christina Kraus (Classics) and Hindy Najman (Religious Studies)
This is the core seminar for the Yale Initiative for the Study of Antiquity and the Premodern World (YISAP), required of graduate students working toward the qualification in YISAP but open to graduate students across the University, including Yale Divinity School students. Weekly meetings explore topics including the history, form, and purpose of scholarly commentary; ancient and medieval scholiastic traditions; commentary and commentators in the academy (the place of philology); commentary and translation; reception of commentary (including a unit on Nabokov’s Pale Fire). To reinforce the multidisciplinary nature of the seminar, we include visits by scholars who will present and discuss topics of relevance to their research and the seminar’s topic. Requirements include weekly readings and discussion, oral presentation on secondary readings, and a research paper.
Spring 2014: Modes of Exchange in Ancient Societies
CLSS 894/ HIST 509/ HSAR 556
Joe Manning (Classics and History) and Milette Gaifman (Classics and History of Art)
In this interdisciplinary seminar we will examine modes of exchange in ancient societies; how did individuals and groups exchange commodities, ideas, beliefs, images, and so on, what drove exchange and what effects did it have? What role did ancient ideologies regarding exchange play in different spheres of life (economic, legal, religious, cultural)? We aim to strike a balance between theorizing types of exchange (economic, belief systems etc) and their effects on one hand, and case studies of exchange in different ancient societies (e.g., Greece, Rome, Egypt, China) on the other.