Archive of WCC-Sponsored Panels at the SCS/AIA Annual Meeting
Gender, Queerness, and Disability in the Ancient World
Organizer: Sydney Hertz, Alicia Matz, and Debby Sneed
Saturday, January 6, 2024, 2:00-5:00pm.
Chicago, IL
The composition of dominant and marginal bodily and sexual identities depends on a variety of cultural narratives that can be complicated, unsettled, and re-written by disability (McRuer 2006). What is more, major feminist issues—from reproductive technologies and the particularities of oppression to the place of bodily difference and the ethics of care—are intricately entangled with disability (Garland-Thomson 2002). This panel will consider the ways that disability, as both a lived reality and a “pervasive cultural system that stigmatizes certain kinds of bodily variations,” can enrich our analyses of gender and sexuality in antiquity (Garland-Thomson 2002, p. 5), as well as how gender and sexuality complicate our understandings of disability.
This is a fruitful area of examination that has thus far been underexplored in the field of ancient studies. And yet, feminism seems to be a perfect companion to critical disability studies, as “the notion of the personal as political has been a cornerstone of the feminist and disability rights movements, and feminist disability studies scholars embrace praxis by taking the complex, lived experience of disability as a starting point for theoretical inquiry…there is also a commitment to addressing epistemic privilege and problematizing certain conceptions of authority and objectivity in the production of knowledge” (Carson 2021, p. 519). Further examination of this, in combination with queerness, reveals parallel processes in which the normative body is formed, as “the system of compulsory able-bodiedness, which in a sense produces disability, is thoroughly interwoven with the system of compulsory heterosexuality that produces queerness” (McRuer 2006, p. 2).
We believe, like Hirsch (1995, p. 3) that “the introduction of a disabled/nondisabled dimension into historical studies brings to light new issues not revealed by familiar categories such as gender, class, race, ethnicity, age, occupation, or rural versus urban settings.” We encourage presenters to engage deeply with feminist disability studies and crip theory, as well as with theories developed within the long history of scholarship on women, gender, and sexuality in the ancient world to consider the ways that intersectional studies reveal new means of (de)stabilizing normative concepts of the body and identity. With this panel, we will examine questions surrounding bodily autonomy and its intersectionality. Is the female gender a category of disability in antiquity? What can an analysis of the treatment of disabled, queer, and feminine bodies in antiquity contribute to modern disability and gender studies? Our goal is to extend current ideas about diversity, intersectionality, and identity and rewrite the history of the body and embodied experience in antiquity.
Debby Sneed, California State University, Long Beach, Alicia Matz, Boston University, Sydney Hertz, Barnard College
”Introduction”
Hannah Biddle, University of Oxford
”Genderfluidity, Prophecy and Blindness – A Study of Tiresias”Justin Lorenzo Biggi, University of St. Andrews
”Two Disabled Women in Epidauros: Agency, Anatomical Votives and Embodied Texts”Carissa Chappell, University of California, Santa Barbara
”Body-Texts and the Bow: Genderqueer, Gendercrip Kinship in Sophocles’ Philoctetes”Jesse Obert, University of California, Berkeley
”Intersex Hoplites? The Normates of Warriorhood in Archaic and Classical Crete”Alexandra O’Neill, Trinity College, Dublin
”Recuperating Catullus’ Attis”Cecily Bateman, University of Cambridge
”Disability, Gender and Slavery in Roman Legal Writing”
Women and the Ancient Economy: Past, Present, and Future
Organizer: Christy Q. Schirmer (University of Texas at Austin)
Sunday, January 8, 2023, 8:00 a.m. - 11:00 a.m.
New Orleans, LA
In our ancient sources, signs of women’s influence on their local surroundings are everywhere, from the bricks produced from the estate of Domitia Lucilla Minor to the “For Rent” notices painted outside the Praedia of Julia Felix in Pompeii and images on reliefs and vase paintings depicting women tavern keepers, fruit sellers, and oil vendors. It is clear from both the material and literary evidence that women participated in a range of industrial activities and influenced the economic landscape in critical ways (e.g., Holleran 2013; Kennedy 2014; Becker 2016), yet they are often underplayed or go unmentioned in ancient sources.
The increased attention on women in the ancient economy has coincided with the rise of female scholars working on the social and economic history of the ancient world. This demographic shift has already generated some discussion (Bowes 2021) about the ways we approach social and economic history and whether changing perspectives and approaches can yield new insights. Although the number of women in leadership roles in archaeology is slowly climbing, it is not keeping pace with the growing number of women who are joining the field, on excavations and in graduate programs (Hamilton 2014).
This panel explores women’s roles in the ancient economy and also the female scholars today who study the ancient economy. The former—from laborers working in or out of the house to wealthy women who finance public buildings—provide a rich landscape of underexplored data (artifacts, inscriptions, documentary texts). The latter—on the growing number of women working on ancient economic studies, traditionally a male-dominated field—prompts us to reflect on how emerging voices can steer the field in new directions.
Christy Q. Schirmer — “Introduction”
1. Katherine Harrington — “On the ‘Invisibility of Women’s Labor: Redefining Work in Ancient Greece”
2. Jane Miller Tully — “Women in Stems: Produce Vendors in the Athenian Agora”
3. Lin Foxhall — “Entrepreneuring Women: Making and Marketing Textiles in Classical Greek Cities”
4. Olivia Graves — “Evaluating Compensation for Working Women in the Roman Empire”
5. Sarah Levin-Richardson — “Sex Work and Affective Labor: A Feminist Approach to the Ancient Economy”
6. Selena Ross — "Working Inside the Outdoors: Domestic Labor and the Role of Women in Roman Animal Husbandry"
WCC Past, Present, and Future: A Celebration of the WCC’s 50th Anniversary
Organizers: Caroline Cheung (Princeton University) and Suzanne Lye (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
Thursday, January 6, 2022, 2:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m
Virtual Meeting
Fifty years ago, a group of scholars founded the Women’s Classical Caucus in North America to support women classicists and feminist scholarship. Some of their goals included minimizing the gap between men and women in the profession and increasing opportunities for women scholars. Since its founding, the Women’s Classical Caucus has been a major force in the field: promoting “unconventional” scholarship; building a community; recognizing cutting-edge feminist work; and advocating for equality for women and inclusion of people from diverse backgrounds. The WCC is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, affiliated group of the Society of Classical Studies. The 50th anniversary of its foundations is an opportunity to both look back to the WCC’s early history and trace its development over the past five decades, as well as consider its current and future roles in the field in promoting equity. Although the field has changed since its foundation, some of the same issues and concerns either remain or wax and wane over the last five decades. The WCC has continued advocating for gender parity and has made great strides in supporting its members through its programming, travel funds, childcare funds, mentorship program, awards, and, most recently, the COVID-19 Relief Fund. This workshop contains several presentations, discussions, and interactive elements that highlight the WCC’s rich history and exciting future. Speakers include a range of WCC members and elected officers across different career stages and from different backgrounds.
Welcome and Introduction — Suzanne Lye (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) and Caroline Cheung (Princeton University)
1. Nandini Pandey (University of Wisconsin-Madison) — The Promise and Possibility of the Women’s Classical Caucus
2. Amy Richlin (University of California, Los Angeles) — What the WCC Means to Me
3. Caroline Cheung (Princeton University) — What Women(’s Classical Caucus Members) Want
4. Suzanne Lye (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) — Where Mission Meets Strategy: Structuring the Women’s Classical Caucus for the 21st Century
5. Eunice Kim (Furman University) and Adriana Vazquez (University of California, Los Angeles) — Finding Our Core: WCC Membership, Mentorship, and Outreach
"What Is a Woman?," or, Intersextional Feminisms: Exploring Ancient Definitions of Womanhood Beyond the Binary
Organizers: Caitlin Hines (University of Cincinnati), Serena S. Witzke (Wesleyan University), and T. H. M. Gellar-Goad (Wake Forest University)
Thursday, January 6, 2022, 11:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.
Virtual Meeting
The Greek and Latin languages have three genders, not two, divided into discrete — but not impermeable — categories of masculine, feminine, and neuter. Greek and Roman art and material culture both employ binaries (e.g., white skin for women, red for men) and confound them, as with depictions of a pale Achilles in feminine disguise on Scyra. Medical and philosophical approaches to gender seem sometimes to operate on a monopole rather than a binary, as with some readings of the Hippocratic corpus’ woman as inverse of man, or Aristotle’s woman as mutilated man. Literary representations of gender, as our panelists will demonstrate, offer insight into the complexity and fluidity of gender identity and expression in antiquity. There is now a growing body of scholarship that works to push past binary taxonomies of sex and gender: our panelists offer fresh readings of Homer, Vergil, Ovid, Sappho, and Apuleius from this angle, challenging the limits of traditional constructions of gender and exploring the heuristic potential of womanhood beyond the binary.
Introduction, Caitlin Hines (University of Cincinnati), Serena S. Witzke (Wesleyan University), and T. H. M. Gellar-Goad (Wake Forest University)
1. Eleonora Colli (Oxford University) — Compared to What?: Reverse Similes, Animal Similes, and Poetic Language Beyond the Gender Binary in Homeric Epic
2. Thomas Biggs (University of St. Andrews / University of Georgia) — Camilla/Chloreus: Gender Fluidity and Intersexuality in Aeneid 11
3. Erin Lam (University of California, Berkeley) — Breaking Bodies: Materiality and Vulnerability in Heroides 12
4. Simona Martorana (Durham University) — Beyond a Binary Sappho: (Re)Thinking Sappho’s Gender and Sexuality in Ovid, Her. 15
5. Victoria Hodges (Rutgers University) — The Rope, the Witch, and the Non-Binary in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses
Think of the Children!
Organizers: Melissa Funke (m.funke@uwinnipeg.ca) and Victoria Austen-Perry (v.austen-perry@uwinnipeg.ca)
Saturday, January 9, 2021, 9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m
Virtual Meeting
Whitney Houston famously sang that “The children are our future.” What, then, is the future of Classics? That depends on what the children are seeing, hearing, and enacting as they absorb aspects of Greek and Roman antiquity through education and play. The avenues for such influence are limitless, ranging from written sources (storybooks, novels, ancient texts assigned in the classroom), to visual materials (tv, comics, film) to board games, computer games, toys, dolls, and craft projects.
Submissions should consider what image of the ancient world is marketed through such products and why this is the case. They may also question how problematic aspects of antiquity, especially the status of women, are handled in rendering the classics “child-friendly” (e.g. the grotesqueries of myth or the facts of slavery). Can negative aspects of the ancient world such as misogyny and slavery be reconceptualized for children without betraying or disguising antiquity beyond recognition? How is the cultural capital or fame of the classics used to market such items and with what results? We are particularly interested in how such materials are marketed to girls as opposed to boys and how girls and women in antiquity are presented to contemporary children. How is the cultural capital or fame of the classics used to market such items and with what results?
Introduction, Victoria Austen (University of Winnipeg)
1. Kathryn H. Stutz (Johns Hopkins University) — Nationalism and Imperialism in Futures Past: Classical Reception in Louisa Capper’s A Poetical History of England: Written for the Use of Young Ladies Educated at Rothbury-House School (1810)
2. Alison John (Ghent University) — ‘Puella est pulchra’: Misogyny, Slavery, and Modern Stereotypes in Latin Learning Resources
3. Natalie Swain (University of Bristol) — Changing the Story & Rejecting Female Gender Roles in ‘King’s Quest 4’ (1988)
4. Rebecca Resinski (Hendrix College) — Post-Patriarchal Pandoras for Very Young Readers
5. Sierra Schiano (University of Colorado, Boulder) —Persephone Reclaimed? Assessing Romantic Retellings of the Rape of Persephone
Response, Melissa Funke (University of Winnipeg)
Sisters Doin’ It for Themselves:
Women in Power in the Ancient World and the Ancient Imaginary
Organizers: Serena S. Witzke (Wesleyan University) and T. H. M. Gellar-Goad (Wake Forest University)
Sunday, January 5, 2020, 8:00 a.m. - 11:00 a.m.
Washington, D. C.
Among the most prominent anxieties expressed in sources from the ancient world are the fears of the wrath of the gods, of the destruction brought on by war, and of women in charge. Oppressed and controlled by the patriarchies of antiquity, women were not often allowed constitutional or legal roles in official affairs, but nevertheless found ways to exercise autonomy and accrue authority in the home, the community, and the state — and in some places and times, women wielded legitimate and public power. This panel will features papers exploring both historical expressions of women’s authority and influence (both formal and informal) and the imagined incarnations of women’s power, as well as the intersections of gender, status, ethnos, ability, and power.
Introduction, T. H. M. Gellar-Goad (Wake Forest University) and Serena S. Witzke (Wesleyan University)
1. Catherine M. Draycott (Durham University) — If I Say That the Polyxena Sarcophagus was Deisgned for a Woman, Does that Make Me a TERF? Identity Politics and Power Now and Then
2. Alana Newman (Monmouth College) — Breaking the Glass Ceiling: Ptolemaic Faience and the Limits of Female Power
3. Krishni Schaefgen Burns (University of Illinois at Chicago) — Cornelia’s Connections: Political Influence in Cross-Class Female Networks
4. Morgan E. Palmer (University of Nebraska, Lincoln) — Always Advanced by Her Recommendations: The Vestal Virgins and Women’s Mentoring
5. Jessica Clark (Florida State University) — Chiomara and the Roman Centurion
6. Gunnar Dumke (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg) — Basilissa, Not Mahārāni: The Indo-Greek Queen Agathokleia
Global Feminism and the Classics
Organizers: Andrea Gatzke (SUNY-New Paltz) and Jeremy LaBuff (Northern Arizona University)
Saturday, January 6, 2019, 1:45 p.m. - 4:45 p.m.
San Diego, CA
Global/transnational feminism is a framework that challenges the universalizing tendencies of Western feminism, and works toward a more expansive appreciation of the diversity inherent to the experiences of women and sexual minorities across the globe. It accomplishes this by taking into consideration the wide variation of cultural, economic, religious, social, and political factors that differentially impact women in different places. Yet the potential utility of this concept to the discipline of classical studies remains largely untapped. For all of the modifications and corrections made to Foucault’s History of Sexuality, the Greco-Roman world’s position as ancestor to the Modern West too often frames how we situate the study of gender and sexuality in antiquity. Global/transnational feminism offers ways to make the discipline more inclusive by transcending this ancient-modern comparison and further contextualizing classical phenomena through contemporary cross-cultural study and consideration of how gender and sexuality might intersect with other social categories like ethnicity or class. Such approaches can help us identify important connections and differences between distinct cultures, but perhaps more importantly, can serve to establish the value and limitations of the theories and methodologies we implement in studying gender and sexuality.
1. Margaret Day (The Ohio State University) — The Sisters of Semonides’ Wives: Rethinking Female-Animal Kingship
2. Elizabeth LaFray (Siena Heights University) — The Emancipation of the Soul: Gender and Body-Soul Dualism in Ancient Greek and Indian Philosophy
3. Sarah Christine Teets (University of Virginia) — Mapping the Intersection of Greek and Jewish Identity in Josephus’ Against Apion
4. Hilary J. C. Lehmann (Knox College) — Past, Present, Future: Pathways to a More Connected Classics
Response, Erika Zimmermann Damer
Material Girls: Gender and Material Culture in the Ancient World
Organizers: Mireille Lee (Vanderbilt University) and Lauren Hackworth Petersen (University of Delaware)
Friday, January 5, 2018, 1:45 p.m. - 4:45 p.m.
Boston, MA
(A Joint AIA-SCS Panel)
From birth to death, individuals negotiated ancient constructions of gender through their engagement with objects. Articles of dress were essential for communicating and construing gender. Hand-held objects such as walking-sticks or parasols served as “props” for the public performance of gender. Gendered activities such as textile-production and warfare required the use of specialized tools such as the distaff and bronze weapons that were themselves highly gendered. Objects were employed at critical life-stages: the choes used at the anthesteria, for example, or birthing amulets that ensured a successful delivery. Objects were also used to subvert gender ideologies, as for example in Euripides’ Medea, in which the wedding gift of the poisoned robe results in death. How do objects construct gender in ancient societies? How do objects disrupt conventional constructions of gender? How are objects themselves gendered? What theoretical approaches are most helpful for the interpretation of gender and ancient objects? What role has the reception of ancient objects played in the construction of gender in modern societies?
1. Stamatia Dova (Hellenic College Holy Cross) — Procne, Philomela and the Voice of the Peplos
2. Anne-Sophie Noel (Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies) — Unveiling female feelings for objects: Deianeira and her ὄργανα in Sophocles’ Trachiniai
3. Teresa Yates (University of California, Irvine) — Binding Male Sexuality: Tacility and Female Autonomy in Ancient Greek Curse Tablets
4. Hérica Valladares (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) — Of Soleae and Self-Fashioning: Roman Women’s Shoes from Vindolanda to Sidi Ghrib
5. Anne Truetzel (Princeton University) — Ritual Implements and the Construction of Identity for Roman Women
6. Mira Green (University of Washington, Seattle) — Butcher Blocks, Vegetable Stands, and Home-Cooked Food: Resisting Gender and Class Constructions in the Roman World
Mothers and Daughters in Antiquity
Organizers: Serena S. Witzke (Wake Forest University) and Sharon L. James (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Friday, January 6, 2017, 1:35 p.m. - 4:45 p.m.
Toronto, ON, Canada
The year 2014 marked the two thousandth anniversary of the death of Julia the Elder, and 2016 marks that of her mother Scribonia, who gave up her safety and pleasures in Rome to spend the remainder of her life in exile with her daughter, whom she had rarely seen. Nevertheless, Scribonia risked Augustus’ displeasure to give her daughter succor in exile. 2017 is a fitting date, then, for considering mother-daughter relationships in antiquity. These relationships have mostly been ignored in scholarship: the lives of women, who did not write and were not major subjects of male writing, are hard to see. The primacy of the father-son relationship eclipses the ties of mothers and daughters, in both ancient materials and classical scholarship. But this female relationship can be found in numerous media (e.g., art, archaeology, literature, philosophy, epigraphy) and approaches (socio-cultural, philological, theoretical) across ancient Mediterranean cultures.
Introduction, Serena Witzke (Wake Forest University)
1. Suzanne Lye (Darthmouth College) — Like Mother, Like Daughter: Rhea and Demeter as Models of Subversion in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter
2. Ellen Greene (University of Oklahoma) — Mothers and Daughters in the Epigrams of Anyte
3. Walter Penrose (San Diego State University) — Tough Love: Loyalties and Tensions among Ptolemaic Queens and their Daughters
4. Erin McKenna (Fordham University) — Ego Filia: Maternal Rejection in Catullus 63
5. Mary T. Boatwright (Duke University) — Imperial Mothers and Daughters in Second-Century Rome
Response, Sharon L. James (University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill)
Women and Water
Organizers: Sarah Blake (York University) and Chiara Sulprizio (Independent Scholar)
Saturday, January 9, 2016, 2:00 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.
San Francisco, CA
This panel seeks to survey the relationship between women and water and to explore the many meanings generated by this relationship as it evolved in the visual, written and material record of ancient Greece and Rome. Why did these societies so strongly identify water with femininity, and why was sexuality such a pronounced aspect of this association? How did this gendered understanding of water and of the aquatic realm influence women’s cultural experiences and daily lives, as they gathered drinking water, offered sacrifice, bathed and nourished themselves? Does this association remain at all relevant to notions of gender difference in the modern world?
1. Anise K. Strong (Western Michigan University) — Well-Washed Whores: Prostitutes, Brothels and Water Usage in the Roman Empire
2. David Wright (Rutgers University) — Annie Get Your Jug: Anna Perenna and Water in the Aeneid
3. Anna Bonnell-Freidin (Princeton University) — Fluid Dynamics: Interpreting Reproductive Risk in Greco-Roman Medicine
4. Carl Anderson (Michigan State University) and Maryline Parca (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign/University of San Diego) — Women, Water, and Politics in Aristophanic Comedy
5. Bridget Langley (University of Washington, Seattle) — Female Plumbers in the Metamorphoses: Women Talking Water
Breastfeeding and Wet-Nursing in Antiquity
Organizer: C. W. Marshall (University of British Columbia)
Friday, January 9, 2015, 10:45 a.m. - 12:45 p.m.
New Orleans, LA
This panel considers the realities of nursing and the ideas surrounding the practice in Greece and Rome, with the hope of combining historical, economic, sociological, and literary evidence in order to gain a greater understanding of the practice. How widely was nursing practiced and how do we quantify the nurse’s position in the household? What does this mean for the presentation of nurse figures in tragedy? What was the impact of breastfeeding as a form of contraception in antiquity? Comparison with other preindustrial cultures (for which different categories of evidence survive) might also prove informative. And what then can we make of cross-species nursing, as with Telephus or Romulus and Remus?
1. Catalina Popescu (Texas Tech University) — Clytemnestra’s Breast as a Receptacle of Memory in Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers
2. Maryline Parca (University of San Diego) — The Wet-Nurses of Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt
3. Tara Mulder (Brown University) — Adult Breastfeeding in Ancient Rome
4. Stamatia Dova (Hellenic College) — Lactation Cessation and the Realities of Martyrdom in the Passion of Saint Perpetua
Provincial Women in the Roman Imagination
Saturday, January 4, 2014, 8:30 a.m. - 11:00 a.m.
Chicago, IL
This panel asks bracing and provocative questions: Is there a “norm” in how provincial women are portrayed in our sources? How Roman must a woman be to be considered a “good” woman? Are our sources homogeneously essentialist, or may we discern some differences in how provincial women are portrayed with regard to race, nationality, and socio-political status? The panelists tackle these questions from the literary socio-historical, and art-historical perspectives, and ground their analyses on multiple theoretical approaches ranging from identity and gender studies to critical race feminism.
1. Laura Brant (Indiana University) — Becoming Romanae: Apuleius and the Identity of Provincial Women
2. Shelley Haley (Hamilton College) — Re-presenting Reality: Provincial Women as Tools of Roman Social Reproduction
3. Caitlin Gillespie (Western Washington University) — The Wolf and the Hare: Boudica’s Political Bodies in Tacitus and Dio
4. Rachael Cullick (University of Minnesota) — Iudaea capta: Berenice in Suetonius’ Life of Titus
5. Hillary Conley (Florida State University) — Matrona Romana: Non-Roman libertinae Funerary Monuments in Roman Britain
Sexual Labor in the Ancient World
Organizer: Allison Glazebrook (Brock University)
Sunday, January 6, 2013, 8:00 a.m. - 10:30 a.m.
Seattle, WA
The female prostitute is an important locus for the study of women, gender, and sexuality, and the study of sexual labor more broadly connects to social, cultural, legal and economic history, revealing much about gender relations, attitudes towards sexuality, and the urban landscape of ancient cities. This panel explores the types of sexual labor and its associated terminology, the connections between sexual labor and gender and/or the body, between sexual laborers and social/legal status in the ancient world using literary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence.
1. Serena Witzke (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) — Harlots, Tarts, and Hussies: A Crisis of Terminology for “Sex Labor”
2. Mira Green (University of Washington, Seattle) — Witnesses and Participants in the Shadows: The sexual lives of enslaved women and boys in ancient Rome
3. Mireille Lee (Vanderbilt University) — Other Ways of Seeing: Hetairai as Viewers of the Knidian Aphrodite
4. Sarah Levin-Richardson (Rice University) — The Archaeology of Social Relationships in Pompeii’s Brothel
5. Deborah Kamen (University of Washington, Seattle) — Apo tou sômatos ergasia: Investigating the Labor of Prostitutes in the Delphic Manumission Inscriptions
6. Max L. Goldman (Vanderbilt University) — The Auletrides and Prostitution
Women and War
Organizers: Karen Bassi and Chris Ann Matteo
Friday, January 6, 2012, 11:15 a.m. – 1:15 p.m.
Philadelphia, PA
Women have been both the putative causes of war and its most constant victims. This panel explores the relationship between women and the causes, contingencies, and consequences of military conflict in the Greco-Roman world and its literary and material culture.
1. Danielle La Londe (Haverford College) — Tarpeia’s Peace Treaty in Propertius 4.4
2. Karen Acton (University of Arizona) — Imperial Women and the Civil War: Poppaea, Berenice, and Triaria in Tacitus’ Histories
3. Marian W. Makins (University of Pennsylvania) — From Widows to Witches: Women and Aftermath in Roman Imperial Literature
Response, Jacqueline Fabre-Serris (Université de Lille 3), editor, EuGeStA
What Became of Lily Ross Taylor? Women and Ancient History in North America
Organizers: Celia E. Schultz and Michele R. Salzman
Saturday, January 8, 2011, 8:30 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.
San Antonio, TX
(Co-Sponsored by the Women’s Classical Caucus and the APA Committee on Ancient History)
The panel takes stock of the state of the study and teaching of ancient history in North America. What has changed since the 1970s that has encouraged more women to enter the field? What does it mean that the proportion of women in ancient history is in keeping with the representation of women in the wider field of History, but is not in pace with the wider field of Classics?Is there a difference in the circumstances faced by women in departments of History, of Classics, and independent graduate groups? How can the APA and the WCC assist in attracting more women to this endeavor?
Introduction, Celia E. Schultz (University of Michigan)
1. Nathan Rosenstein (The Ohio State University) — Ancient History and the Undergraduate Woman
2. Elizabeth Carney (Clemson University) — Looking for Lily: Women and Ancient History
3. Sara Forsdyke (University of Michigan) — Women in Ancient History Graduate Programs in the U.S.A.
4. Ellen Bauerle (University of Michigan Press) — Where Are the Historians of Yesteryear?
Gender, East and West in the Ancient World
Organizers: Maryline Parca and Angeliki Tzanetou
Saturday, January 9, 2010, 1:45 p.m. – 4:15 p.m.
Orange County (Anaheim), CA
The panel explores the ways in which Greeks and the Romans started conceptualizing the West’s historical, political and cultural distinctiveness with respect to the East. Gender as a category played a central role in articulating this dichotomy and it now provides a tool for retrieving and analyzing the interactions that underlie the polarity. The papers seek to document the evolution of attitudes toward the East in different periods and probe the ways in which they informed various ideologies (e.g., superiority, hybridity, assimilation) and shaped relations of gender, ethnicity and power.
1. Emily Baragwanath (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) — Panthea’s Sisters: Negotiating East–West Polarities through Gender in Xenophon
2. Suzanne Lye (University of California, Los Angeles) — Gender and Ethnicity in Heliodorus’ Aithiopica
3. Vassiliki Panoussi (The College of William and Mary) — Spinning Hercules: Gender, Religion, and Geography in Propertius 4.9
4. Antony Augoustakis (Baylor University) — Raping Achilles and the Poetics of Manhood: Re(de)fining Europe and Asia in Statius’ Achilleid
5. Suzanne B. Faris (Independent Scholar) — Crossing Borders, Crossing Categories: When Westerners Go East
6. Prudence Jones (Montclair State University) — Rewriting Power: Zenobia, Aurelian, and the Historia Augusta
Women, Power, and Leadership in the Ancient World
Organizers: Ruby Blondell, Susanna Braund, and Elizabeth Langridge-Noti
Saturday, January 9, 2009, 8:30 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.
Philadelphia, PA
Ancient social formations excluded women from the exercise of political or military power almost entirely; yet our sources provide surprisingly numerous glimpses of powerful women, both real and imagined. This panel explores both overt and covert female interventions in the “masculine” arenas of political and/or military power, addressing various problems involved in identifying and defining female power and leadership, recovering the traces of powerful women in the historical record, and exploring ways in which the representation of female power is inflected by historical period, social class, sexual and/or marital status, medium of representation, and literary genre.
Introduction, Elizabeth Langridge-Noti (The American College of Greece)
1. Elizabeth Carney (Clemson University) — Royal Women as Succession Advocates
2. Margaret Woodhull (University of Colorado, Denver) — Women Building Rome: Reconsidering the Porticus Liviae and Gender in Rome’s Cityscape
3. Sanjaya Thakur (University of Michigan) — Ulixes stolatus? Ovid’s Livia Reconsidered
4. Kathryn Chew (California State University, Long Beach) — Pulcheria’s Paradigm: A Woman’s Power in the Eastern Roman Empire
5. Suzanne Lye (University of California, Los Angeles) — The Empress Theodora: The Power in Front of the Throne
Space and Gender
Organizers: Mireille Lee and Ann Suter
Saturday, January 5, 2008, 8:30 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.
Chicago, IL
One of the most useful concepts to emerge from feminist studies has been that of the dynamic relationship between gender and space: space as an arena for the performance of gender, and the organization of space as a reflection of the social negotiation of gender. This panel considers issues of who decided who could be where and doing what, the effect of gendered space on the individual, and how these decisions and effects might be manipulated, in real life or in literature.
1. Jed M. Thorn (University of Cincinnati) — In the Bedroom: Gender and the cubiculum in Cicero’s Pro Caelio
2. Sarah Levin-Richardson (Stanford University) — Gendered Interactions: A Dynamic Approach to Gender and Space
3. Chiara Sulprizio (University of Southern California) — The War at Home: Violence, Gender and Space in Aristophanes’ Wasps
4. Penelope M. Allison (University of Leicester) — Roman Military Bases as Complex Gendered Spaces
5. Donald Lateiner (Ohio Wesleyan University) — Gendered Exclusion, Seclusion, Incarceration and Expulsion in Greek and Roman Fictions