PhD Study at the Institute of Classical Studies

The ICS is now accepting applications for doctoral study under the supervision of Prof. Greg Woolf and Dr Gabriel Bodard.

Both part-time and full time study is available, in a range of topics in classics and ancient history.
 
To make an application, please contact the Manager of the Institute.

More details here

Library opening hours over the Christmas period

Evening opening (Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays until 8pm) will end on 17th December and begin again on 12th January.

 

The last Saturday opening will be 19th December, and the first in the new year will be 9th January.

 

The library will close on Wednesday 23rd December (late afternoon) and open again on Monday 4th January.



ICS Events this week: 7th - 12th December 2015

Monday 7 December
16:30 ICS Ancient Philosophy Seminar
Aristotle and the poets on the ethics of wealth
Kleanthis Mantzouranis (St Andrews)

17:00 ICS Ancient Literature Seminar
Does opsis do justice to the Visual in tragedy?
Oliver Taplin (Oxford)

Tuesday 8 December
18:00 Women Writing the Classics
Classics in Contemporary Women's Prose
Elizabeth Cook and Salley Vickers, chaired by Efi Spentzou (RHUL)

Thursday 10 December
16:30 ICS Ancient History Seminar
Monarchies and Republics in Etruria: Myths, Objects, and Political Theory
Corinna Riva (UCL)

Friday 11 December
16:30 ICS Postgraduate Work in Progress Seminar
τὸ ἴδιον: Literary contexts for hellenistic definitions of poetry
Spencer Klavan (Oxford)
 
ICS Events Page 
Seminar and Lecture Series

ICS Events this week: 30th November - 5th December 2015

Monday 30 November
17:00 ICS Ancient Literature Seminar
Senses of presence: Vision, spaciality and embodiment in Greek literature and rhetoric.
Ruth Webb (Lille)

Tuesday 1 December
17:00 ICS Classical Archaeology Seminar
Drawing towards Reconstruction: Illustration Projects at the British Museum
Kate Morton (British Museum)

17:30 Accordia Lecture
Sanctuaries and states in the archaic Mediterranean and beyond
Greg Woolf (ICS)

Wednesday 2 December 
15:30 ICS Mycenaean Series
Mycenaean iconography and agency
James Wright (Athens)

Thursday 3 December
16:45  ICS Ancient History Seminar
Zela, acclamations, Caracalla – and Parthia?
Andrew Burnett (BM)

Friday 4 December
14:30 ICS Early Career Seminar
Dynasts in Action. Art and Society in the Eastern Mediterranean under Persian Rule
Alessandro Poggio

16:30 ICS Postgraduate Work in Progress Seminar
'How to praise the emperor inoffensively': Representation of power, or self-representation in the writings of Julian the Emperor
Lea Niccolai (Pisa)

Saturday 5 December
14:30 ICS Virgil Society Lecture
Fatum and fortuna: religion and philosophy in Virgil's Aeneid
Calypso Nash
 
ICS Events Page 
Seminar & Lecture Series

Early closure of the Library on 25th November 2015

 

Please note that the ICS/Joint Library will close at 1:45pm on 25th November 2015.

 

This is due to the closure of Senate House for the University of London Foundation Day.

 

We apologise for any inconvenience this will cause.

 

 

 

ICS events this week: 16th-21st November 2015

Monday 16 November
17:00 ICS Ancient Literature Seminar
Elegiac perspectives on the visual arts, from antiquity to the Renaissance
Luke Houghton (Reading)

Wednesday 18 November
17:00 ICS Autumn Lecture in association with the British School at Athens
New investigations and finds at the Mycenaean palace of Thebes (Boeotia)
Vassilis Aravantinos (Ephor Emeritus of Boeotia)

Thursday 19 November
16:30 ICS Ancient History Seminar
Aspect and agency in epigraphic signatures
Stephen Colvin (UCL)

Friday 20 November
16:30 ICS Postgraduate Work in Progress Seminar
Financial crisis and Demosthenes' political début
Robert J. Sing (Cambridge)

ICS Events Page 

ICS events this week: 9-14th November 2015

Monday 9 November
16:30 ICS Ancient Philosophy Seminar
Intentionality and the Transparency of Cognitive Activities in Damascius
Péter Lautner (Pázmany Péter University, Budapest)

17:00 ICS Ancient Literature Seminar
Rewriting Greek Myths on Roman Sarcophagi
Zahra Newby (Warwick)

Tuesday 10 November
18:00 ICS and Friends of the British School at Athens
FBSA Lecture: Ceramic production in the Northeast Peloponnese: a view from the Berbati Valley, Greece
Dr Ian Whitbread
The chair will be taken by Prof. Ian Freestone of the Institute of Archaeology, London.

Thursday 12 November
16:30 ICS Ancient History Seminar
Ancient Texts and Objects in the Late Renaissance: Questions of Chronology
William Stenhouse (Yeshiva University, NY)

Friday 13 November
14:30 ICS Early Career Seminar
Narrative Time in Three Epistles of Sidonius Apollinaris
Michael Hanaghan

16:30 ICS Postgraduate Work in Progress Seminar
A drunken windbag: Maecenas in Sen. Epist. 19.9
Janja Soldo (Birkbeck/LMU Munich)

ICS Events page 

ICS events this week: 2nd - 7th November 2015

Tuesday 3 November
17:00 ICS Classical Archaeology Seminar
Interpreting Troy in London: Objects, Illustrations and Photographs in Schliemann's Exhibition
Abigail Baker (Birkbeck)

Thursday 5 November
10:00 Digital Classics Workshop
Structuring and visualising data: A training workshop for postgraduate students and researchers on structuring and visualising historical data.
The workshop will be taught by Silke Vanbeselaere (KU Leuven) and Gabriel Bodard (ICS).

16:30 ICS Ancient History Seminar
The Stuff of the Gods: The Material Aspects of Religion in Ancient Greece
Robin Osborne (Cambridge)

Friday 6 November
16:30 ICS Postgraduate Work in Progress Seminar
The strange case of BPG 80: An unedited manuscript containing Greek letters
Roberta Berardi (Bari)

Saturday 7 November
14:00 Women Writing the Classics
'My safety lies with other poets/ who've shown the way they took through shadows': Gwyneth Lewis and the Classics
Gwyneth Lewis with Elena Theodorakopoulos (Birmingham), Fiona Cox (Exeter) and Ruth MacDonald (RHUL), chaired by Elena Theodorakopoulos 

ICS Events page

New online resources for Chinese classicists

Launched in 2015, Dickinson Classics Online will provide resources for Chinese students and scholars of Latin and Greek. This collaboration between western and Chinese scholars will include lexica and grammars, language teaching tools, and new commentaries and translations. The first tool available on the website is a Chinese version of the Core Latin and Greek Vocabularies from the Dickinson College commentaries.

Where Chinese versions of Latin and Greek texts are available, many are translations of modern European language translations, often enfused with modern western perspectives that are not necessarily present in the original text. New Chinese translations and tools for translation will therefore be extremely valuable to both current and new generations of Chinese students and scholars of Ancient Greek and Latin.


Links:

Dickinson Classics Online

http://www.dickinson.edu/news/article/1766/east_meets_western_classics

http://www.depauw.edu/news-media/latest-news/details/31968/

New PhD in the field of Classical Antiquity and contemporary visual art

TECHNE: Call for proposals/expressions of interest: PhD study in the field of classical antiquity and contemporary visual art,  Royal College of Art/Royal Holloway, University of London

Students with an interest in pursuing interdisciplinary PhD study in any area of classical antiquity and contemporary art practice are invited to send in letters of enquiry/proposals to Dr. Jaspar Joseph-Lester (Royal College of Art) and Professor Ahuvia Kahane (Royal Holloway, University of London). The proposed research may adopt historical, critical, philosophical or practice based approaches, or any mix of the above and may focus on any aspect of Greek or Roman history, culture and thought in relation to contemporary art.  

Students whose proposals are accepted will be jointly supervised by Dr. Jaspar Joseph-Lester, Reader in Fine Art, Royal College of Art, and Prof. Ahuvia Kahane, Prof. of Greek, Royal Holloway, University of London and may submit their primary registration for the Ph.D. to either RCA or RHUL. We expect to submit supervisees for RHUL/RCA the TECHNE PhD awards scheme. Interested students are also invited to come to a TECHNE Open Evening on 11 Nov., 2015, from 5.30 to 7.30pm at the Royal Holloway’s central London premises at 11 Bedford Square, WC1B 3RA (Montague Place – just behind the University of London’s Senate House – for map, see  https://www.google.co.uk/maps?q=WC1E+6DP&hl=en&sll=52.8382,-2.327815&sspn=10.932975,19.753418&hnear=London+WC1E+6DP,+United+Kingdom&t=m&z=16), room 003 (drinks and nibbles will be served).

Email enquiries: jaspar.joseph-lester@rca.ac.uk or ahuvia.kahane@rhul.ac.uk

Ahuvia Kahane, MA, DPhil

Professor of Greek, Department of Classics, 

Royal Holloway, University of London, FW017

Egham, Surrey, TW20 0EX

+44 (0)1784 443 208 (office)
+44 (0)7799 41 81 41(mobile)
Akahane3208 (Skype)

Hadrian's Wall of Sound

The ancient site, famous for keeping the barbarians at bay, provides a stunning backdrop for this most cultured of events - a novel outdoor music gathering that moves along the expanse of the wall from Carlisle to Newcastle.  Harps, Saxophones and the good old Ucayali provide some of the diverse sounds emanating from this splendid cacophony.

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-england-32974175

If anyone from the library is/has been lucky enough to have taken any pictures that you want to share, remember to use the #BBCMusicDay  #joliheroics

Virtual tour of the Library

There is now a link from the Library Home (News) page to a tour of the library, starting at the Reception desk, through / past the literature corridor and rooms and onto the Papyrology and Epigraphy room.  Turning left from here, you reach the archaeology room with the main journal collection at the end of the room, before turning left again into the history / civilisation room, the numismatics room and the computer room.

Nostell Priory Greek Vases Archive

 

This important series of early nineteenth-century manuscripts was rediscovered in 2014 within the Beazley Archive in Oxford University's Classical Art Research Centre.

The papers document the purchase and display of the famous collection of classical Attic and South Italian vases and other objects acquired by Charles Winn, 8th Baronet of Nostell, from Naples in 1819. They include numerous letters written in 1818 between Charles Winn and his agent Dr. Richard Harrison negotiating the prospective purchase from the seller of the collection, Abbe H. Campbell. Matters discussed include the price, custom dues and potential rival bidders. Later letters deal with the financial arrangements, efforts by Cambell to sell Charles Winn other antiquities (including sculpture), details about packing and transport, and finally a notice that the collection had sailed for England on 9th February 1819. Also included is the original printed catalogue of the collection compiled by Campbell before the acquisition in 1818. Some later material (undated, but written on paper watermarked in 1837), may provide evidence for additional purchases of vases from the Mainwaring Collection in Lincolnshire.

When the vases were sold from Nostell Priory by Christie's in 1975, the archival material was retained and ended up in the Beazley Archive among the papers of Sir John Beazley. The vases themselves are now dispersed in public and private collections around the world. The decision has been made to reunite the manuscripts with the sequence of Nostell Priory papers to which they formerly belonged, which are now held by West Yorkshire Archive Service (http://www.archives.wyjs.org.uk).

Letters and Manuscripts 1818-1837: View Nostell Priory Greek Vases Archive Scans

The 1818 Sales Catalogue: View Nostell Priory Sales Catalogue 1818 Scans