Adam Aleksic (Independent Researcher)
"The Semiotics of Slop".
Event Series: GSAS Workshop "Indo-European and Historical Linguistics”.
Monday, November 2, 2026, 5:15 PM – 6:30 PM.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY; Fong Auditorium, Boylston Hall 110, Cambridge, MA.
Arte Povera and Relational Greekness: Memory, the 'Measure of Man,' and Mobility in The Work of Jannis Kounellis
The lecture proposes a reading of Jannis Kounellis’s cultural identity, his Greekness, through memory, the measure of man and mobility. Drawing on Marios Fournaris’s research on Arte Povera and New Humanism, it examines how the “lived experience” of Kounellis’s birthplace, Piraeus, references to Greek antiquity, and the relationship between body and space acquire meaning within different historical and cultural contexts. The discussion focuses on selected works, from the Alfabeti series and the burlap sacks installations to the twelve live horses and the landmark exhibition aboard the cargo ship Ionion, in Piraeus. Metonymy provides the methodological basis for examining the material and historical relations of contiguity that link elements of the works to broader cultural experiences. “Relational Greekness” thus describes a changing relationship with place and cultural heritage. Connecting art history with the comparative study of culture, the lecture examines how cultural continuity is constituted through…
Event contact to appear in listing: Graduate Coordinator: Alexia Wang, jiwang@g.harvard.edu. Event Series (if not listed): Modern Greek Studies Seminar Series.
Wednesday, November 4, 2026, 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM.
Zoom; see registration link below.
For more info visit harvard.zoom.us. Peter Osorio (Harvard University)
Plato's Authority and Plato the Author in Cicero's Tusculans Disputations
Abstract: In the Tusculan Disputations Cicero the character (‘M’) endorses a group of stoicizing views more strongly than in any other late dialogue. But Cicero the author writes the Tusculans as a response to another Latin philosophical book, Marcus Junius Brutus’ De virtute. In this paper, I focus on a series of textual-historical arguments in the first Tusculans in which ‘M’ fashions a Platonic tradition for his views on the basis of the Phaedo. Cicero's method is not only to oppose Brutus’ Antiochean ethics but to challenge Antiochus’ historiographical method of recovering Plato’s ethics from his successors and from Peripatetics. Cicero’s prefaces show that he does not accept M’s or Brutus’ commitments to Platonic authority, and that the textual arguments polemicize Antiochus’ arguments from authority and constitute a historical method of philosophical inquiry.
Event contact to appear in listing: arruzzac@bu.edu.
Tuesday, November 10, 2026, 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM.
BOSTON UNIVERSITY, 745 Commonwealth Ave # 525.
Black Cicero: A Conversation with Mathias Hanses
Sponsored by the Department of the Classics and the Hutchins Center, Harvard University
Featuring Professor Mathias Hanses (Associate Professor of Classics, Penn State University) on his new book Black Cicero: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Ancient Romans in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Oxford University Press, 2026.
In conversation with:
· Hannah Čulik-Baird (Associate Professor of Classics, UCLA)
· Harriet Fertik (Associate Professor of Classics, Ohio State University)
· Andrea Kouklanakis (Associate Professor of Classics, CUNY)
· Professor Jesse McCarthy (John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Harvard University)
· Jackie Murray (Associate Professor of Classics, SUNY Buffalo)
· Dan-el Padilla Peralta (Professor of Classics, Arizona State University)
· Diontay Wolfries-Thomas (Department of the Classics, Harvard University)
The panel will be followed by an EOS Reads event (from 3:30-5 pm), focusing on Du Bois’s classicism: details and readings to follow.…
Thursday, November 12, 2026, 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY; Venue: Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Hip Hop Archive & Research Institute, 104 Mount Auburn Street.
Book Celebration in honor of Leah Whittington
Harvard Classics Lectures
Celebration in honor of Leah Whittington’s book, Antiquity Made Whole: The Renaissance Continuation of Ancient Literature.
Event Series: Mahindra Humanities Center Seminar: Civilizations of Ancient Greece and Rome. Event Series (if not listed): The Early Modern Workshop at Harvard University.
Tuesday, November 17, 2026, 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY, Thompson Room, Barker Center, Cambridge, MA.
For more info visit emworkshop.fas.harvard.edu. Harry Saunders (Harvard)
Event Series: GSAS Workshop "Indo-European and Historical Linguistics”.
Thursday, November 19, 2026, 5:00 PM – 6:30 PM.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY; Boylston Hall 335.
Nathaniel Hess (Warburg Institute)
"Indescribable Textures: Ecphrasis and the Problem of Images in the Latin Poetry of Reformation-era Italy".
Event Series (if not listed): Classical Receptions Workshop.
Friday, November 20, 2026, 12:00 PM – 1:15 PM.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY; Boylston 237.
Ian Wilson (Harvard University)
Event Series: Methods and Practice in Classics Workshop.
Friday, November 20, 2026, 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY; Boylston Hall 237.
Patrick Burns (ISAW/New York University)
How to Fix Your First Billion Latin Typos: AI & Philology at Astronomical Scale
Billions—that’s right, billions!—of errors reside in Latin texts online, a situation created in part from uneven OCR quality in mass digitization projects. We could use this text data to train state-of-the-art Latin language models for tasks like question answering, text summarization, and machine translation, among others, if only these errors could be remediated. In this talk, I discuss my research in discovering and resolving error-prone Latin text at astronomical scale, including experiments in deploying and learning to “trust” agentic AI in the development of philological self-correcting systems. The key question I ask for our AI-inflected times, as applicable to Latin as any other language or humanities discipline: how do we responsibly encourage human-computer collaboration in our research?
Sponsored by the Catherine Frisone Scott Center for Italian Cultural Studies and the Classics & Religious Studies Department,…
Event contact to appear in listing: Jenni Glaser, jenni.glaser@umb.edu.
Tuesday, December 1, 2026, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
UMASS BOSTON; Campus Center (U02-2550), 100 Morrissey Blvd. Boston, MA 02125.
Mauro Bonazzi (Universty of Bologna)
Work in Progress in Ancient Philosophy Series, Reason and Action in Plato's Psychology
In this talk I examine Plato's psychology through a tension between two accounts of reason in the Republic: the practical, supervisory role emphasized in Book IV and the desire for knowledge and contemplation foregrounded in Book IX. I argue that appeals to reason's desire for the Good do not fully reconcile these accounts, since the capacity to govern does not entail a desire to rule. Rather, the philosopher's psychic harmony emerges as a consequence of contemplation: intellectual desire weakens competing appetites, while contemplation of divine order promotes assimilation to it. Comparisons with the Phaedrus and the Timaeus further suggest that our deepest identity lies in the contemplative intellect rather than in the tripartite soul as a whole. This interpretation reveals significant continuities across the dialogues and invites reconsideration of the priority of contemplation over practical and political activity.
Event contact to appear in listing: arruzzac@bu.edu.
Tuesday, December 1, 2026, 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM.
BOSTON UNIVERSITY, 745 Commonwealth Ave # STH 525.
Zachary Rothstein-Dowden (Harvard)
Event Series: GSAS Workshop "Indo-European and Historical Linguistics”.
Thursday, December 3, 2026, 5:00 PM – 6:30 PM.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY; Boylston Hall 335.
Harvard Classics Department Seminar Series (Jan Ziolkowski)
Title TBD.
Event Series: Harvard Classics Departmental Seminar Series.
Tuesday, January 26, 2027, 3:00 PM – 4:30 PM.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY; Plimpton Room, Barker Center, 12 Quincy St. Cambridge, MA.