Group Seminars
Overview
Group Seminars (GSems) are unique to the Graduate Group. Taught by two or more faculty members from different departments, they model interdisciplinary thinking and research and produce memorable intellectual encounters. One or two GSems are offered each year. Students in the Group are required to take at least one, but many take more.
Upcoming Seminars
Material Geologies (Spring 2025)
GSem 608, W 2-4pm
Selby Hearth (Department of Geology)
Alicia Walker (History of Art)
This course mobilizes a humanistically informed approach to the study of geological materials, with a focus on late antique and medieval understandings of stones, minerals, metals, and land formation(s). Readings will encompass current perspectives on the diverse epistemologies of geology in the pre-modern world, from the magical and medicinal properties of gems, to the relation of stone and earth to concepts of empire, to mythologies of landscape and geomorphology. Students will explore primary textual sources such as ancient and medieval magical treatises, travel literature, and lapidaries, including works by Pliny the Elder, Procopius, Paul the Silentiary, and Michael Psellos. The course will also foreground visual and material culture, introducing students to both conventional and innovative methodologies and theoretical frameworks for exploring human understandings of the natural world from an interdisciplinary perspective. Students will work with Bryn Mawr’s outstanding collection of geological samples and will learn fundamentals of mineral identification and crystallography. Final projects are expected to build from students’ primary research interests and disciplinary investments.
Dots and Loops: Form and Aesthetics Across Time and Media (Fall 2025)
GSem 625
Pardis Dabashi (Literatures in English; Film Studies; Middle Eastern, Central Asian, and North African Studies)
C.C. McKee (History of Art)
Though it has long been at the heart of aesthetic criticism, the subject of form as an axis of methodological inquiry has regained conspicuous popularity in recent years. Scholars working across, and at the intersection of, various media--including but not limited to material culture, visual art, sound, film, and literature--have been thinking through the ways that form both informs and is informed by what were considered its various antitheses, such as history, politics, and the material archive. The presumed extrication of external “context” was integral to a hermeneutic of form. This was a driving factor, for instance, in nineteenth-century formalism, used to construct coherent narratives surrounding Classical Antiquity through archaeological and art historical understandings of ornament and architecture. These interests continued with the inception of Russian literary Formalism in the early twentieth century, and then French narratology of the midcentury, for whom Homeric form was particularly important. This seminar will examine the various modes of formalist analysis that have emerged in contemporary criticism and their relationships to the formalisms that have come before, studying them alongside artworks across media and through various global histories. How can form speak across Art History, Classics, and Archaeology and to projects that vary widely in their temporal and geographic scopes, we will ask? What does attention to form yield for interdisciplinary scholars, specifically? What are the scope and limits of thinking with lines, dots, loops, circles, squares, parabolas, and shapes of any kind?
Recent GSems
Death and Beyond (2023-2024)
GSem 619
Jennie Bradbury (Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology)
Radcliffe G. Edmonds (Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies)
Syllabus [PDF]
Click here for information about lectures presented by the Death and Beyond GSem in collaboration with the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology.
History and Memory (Fall 2022)
GSem 652
Lisa Saltzman (History of Art)
Madhavi Kale (History)
Syllabus [PDF]
Urban Morphologies (Spring 2021)
GSem 605
Astrid Lindenlauf (Classical and Near Near Eastern Archaeology)
Jeffrey Cohen (Growth and Structure of Cities)
Syllabus [PDF]
War and Peace in the Ancient World (Spring 2020)
GSem 654
Astrid Lindenlauf (Classical and Near Near Eastern Archaeology)
Annette M. Baertschi (Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies)
Death and Beyond: Ancient Greece and China (Spring 2019)
GSem 619
Radcliffe G. Edmonds (Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies)
Jie Shi (History of Art)
Syllabus [PDF]
Figures of Resistance: Ancient and Modern (Fall 2017)
GSem 623
Annette M. Baertschi (Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies)
Homay King (History of Art and Film Studies)
Syllabus [PDF]
Principles of Preservation and Conservation of Cultural Heritage (Spring 2017)
GSem 602
Marianne Weldon (Special Collections)
Astrid Lindenlauf (Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology)
Syllabus [PDF]
History and Memory (Spring 2016)
GSem 652
Lisa Saltzman (History of Art)
Madhavi Kale (History)
Syllabus [PDF]
Death and Beyond: Ancient Greece and China (Fall 2014)
GSem 619
Radcliffe Edmonds (Greek, Latin & Classical Studies)
Shiamin Kwa (East Asian Studies)
Syllabus [PDF]
Video Art and Temporality (Spring 2014)
GSem 622
Homay King (History of Art and Film Studies)
Hoang Nguyen (English)
Syllabus [PDF]
Encounters (Fall 2013)
GSem 621
Peter Magee (Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology)
Ignacio Gallup-Diaz (History)
War and Peace in the Classical World (Spring 2013)
GSem 654
Annette Baertschi (Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies)
Astrid Lindenlauf (Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology)
Syllabus [PDF]
Carthage: The View from Elsewhere (Fall 2012)
GSem 620
Alicia Walker (History of Art)
Catherine Conybeare (Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies)
Syllabus [PDF]
GSems Archive
For a list of earlier GSems, visit the GSem Archive.
Departmental Seminars