"Enraged: Why Violent Times Need Ancient Greek Myths"

"Painterly Deception in Roman Comedy"

"Hideous Bodies, Deified Heroes in Sophocles and Plato"

"Ancient Greek Anthroponymy, Phraseology, and Indo-European Phraseology"

"'An Early Islamic Agricultural Revolution?' New Light on the Transformation of Agricultural and Irrigation Technologies in the late Roman and Islamic Near East"
Included will be a discussion on projects of OSL dating fields, the early Islamic agricultural estates, the mechanism of introduction and diffusion of qanats in the Near East and beyond (north Africa, Iran and the east), in relation to the main issues raised by Andrew Watson's pioneering research.
Sponsored by The Initiative for the Science of the Human Past at Harvard (SoHP); The Department of the Classics, & The Department of History.

"Clickbait: Thoughts on the Ethics of Digitizing Cultural Heritage"
Thompson's talk will analyze potential downsides to digital reconstructions of threatened cultural heritage, focusing on the lack of control offered to local residents over the creation, dissemination, and interpretation of digitized sites, and the way this "digital colonialism" sometimes mirrors that of past image-making by Western visitors to these sites. 

"The Varieties of Historical Experience"
This lecture is open to the public.

"1177 B.C. The Year Civilization Collapsed"
In this illustrated lecture, based on Professor Eric H. Cline's book of the same title (1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed), Professor Cline explores why the Bronze Age came to an end and whether the collapse of those ancient civilizations might hold some warnings for our current society.
Directions to Event:
www.brandeis.edu.
Free and Open to the public. Free parking. Reception with light refreshments will follow from 6:00-6:30 p.m.
More info: Professor Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow (aoko@brandeis.edu).

"Connecting the Dots. Field Survey and the Archaeology of North Mesopotamia between East and West"

Richard Thomas, the George Martin Lane Professor of the Classics at Harvard University, on his new book Why Bob Dylan Matters
Free and open to the public. Seating is limited.

Two Approaches to the Categories of Thought and Reality
Chair/discussant: Paul Guyer (Jonathan Nelson Professor of Humanities and Philosophy, Brown University)
Harvard-Yenching Institute lunch talk, co-sponsored by the Department of Philosophy
Are there any fundamental forms of thought that are valid across different cultures and represent the basic structure of reality? This question has been addressed by philosophers from the ancient to modern time with their theories of categories. Among the most influential ones are Aristotle and Kant's theories. Both of them take a logico-linguistic analysis of the form of rational discourse as an important clue to the ontological problem of the structure of existence, endorsing a kind of isomorphism between language/thought and reality. However, it is questionable whether their theories are limited by or biased towards the structure of Indo-European languages? There is an alternative approach by another philosopher, Hegel, who rejects the possibility of deriving the structure of reality from basic logico-linguistic forms. By accepting the inevitable cultural-historical conditions of human thought, Hegel's theory of categories can be viewed as an open and dynamic system. The talk will review and compare the above two approaches with an attempt to draw interesting implications for some contemporary problems.

"Hellenistic Kingdoms and Historical Difference"

Topic: Astronomy

TBA

"Blessed Jerome": The Fate of the Vulgate in the Reformation

"The Cultural Politics of Phantasia: Late Antique and Byzantine Developments"
Please RSVP by 4 December to Hannah Weaver (hannahweaver@g.harvard.edu)

"Linguistic remarks on South-West Anatolian inscriptions"

Topic: TBA