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CALL FOR PAPERS
2014 ASGLE APA Panel
January 2-5, 2014, Chicago, IL
Graffiti and Their Supports: Informal Texts in Context

Organized by John Bodel

The American Society of Greek and Latin Epigraphy invites submissions for a panel at the 2014 annual meeting of the American Philological Association, January 2-5, 2014, in Chicago on the topic "Graffiti and Their Supports: Informal Texts in Context."
Graffiti, even more than other inscriptions, are tied to their physical settings-the objects on which they are written, the places where they are displayed, or the spatial relationship they bear to other writings or drawings on the same surfaces. As the recent collection of essays edited by J. A. Baird and C. Taylor, Ancient Graffiti in Context (2011), well demonstrates, not only wall inscriptions from Pompeii but also graffiti and dipinti of various types in myriad contexts from across the ancient Mediterranean world provide evidence of writing practices and written cultures understudied and poorly documented that have seldom been investigated comparatively and for which even local contextualization has in many cases scarcely begun. The sociology of graffiti production and consumption and the cultural history of informal public writing have been productively explored in research on modern graffiti (e.g. N. Macdonald, The Graffiti Subculture, 2002; J. Austin, Taking the Train, 2001; J. Oliver and T. Neal, Wild Signs, 2010), but few inroads have been made into these areas in study of the ancient world.

The aim of this panel is to advance this line of inquiry by soliciting papers that consider ancient Greek and Latin graffiti and other forms of informal writing in context, broadly conceived to include not only physical but also scriptural or visual context. Studies that approach the subject comparatively or theoretically or that examine graffiti as manifestations of particular writing practices are especially welcome. Topics of investigation might include, but are not limited to: the interaction of text and image; “dialogic†graffiti; self-referential graffiti or those that refer to their supports; literacy and popular culture; temporality (ephemerality or permanence); and read-ership and reception.

Abstracts will be evaluated anonymously by the ASGLE Executive Committee and should not be longer than 500 words (bibliography excluded). Please follow the APA Instructions for Abstract Authors and include the ASGLE Abstract Submission Form with your abstract. The abstract should be sent electronically as a MS Word document and the Abstract Submission Form as a PDF by February 1, 2013 to: John Bodel, Vice-President, ASGLE at john_bodel AT brown.edu. All Greek should either be transliterated or employ a Unicode font. Authors submitting abstracts must be APA members in good standing.

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Open Call for Contributions

Between text and praxis: writing ancient science and technology in the
classical world and beyond

April 13-14, 2013 at Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, NL, Canada

The Department of Classics at Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John’s will be hosting an open collaborative workshop on the history of medicine, science, and technology as well as other related fields. We are calling out to potential participants who have a work in progress on any
aspect of the above fields and would like to share and invite feedback. The
work in progress can be, for example, a manuscript in progress or a
conference paper that could be converted to an article manuscript.

Ideally, we are planning for six to eight participants who will circulate
their working documents among one another prior to the workshop. The aim is
to emerge with a substantially more complete manuscript ready to submit for
consideration in a special edition of Mouseion.

The intended format will allow one hour per participant, during which the
presenter presents a 20-minute synopsis of his or her paper. This
presentation can, according to the presenter’s preference, be followed by
any or a combination of the following:

 a Q&A period
 a brainstorming session
 an editing and bibliographic session
 a suggestion & critique session
 a roundtable discussion
 theory and methodology

Limited financial support is available to defray expenses, but participants
are encouraged to seek their own funding.

Please send a description of your work and include your name, position, and
affiliation, and the subject of your research. You should also indicate at
what stage your document will be at the time of the workshop. Proposals must
be submitted by e-mail attachment to Milo Nikolic
(workshop.memorial AT gmail.com) by February 15, 2013 with a response by the
last week of February.

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Nox erat: Night and Nocturnal Activities in the Ancient World
17th Annual Classics Graduate Student Colloquium
University of Virginia
March 23, 2013

From lovers’ trysts to covens of witches, from all-night parties to midnight
raids, from dreams to insomnia, night in the ancient world is far from an
empty darkness that merely marks the interval between sunset and sunrise.
This colloquium aims to consider the characteristics and depictions of night
both as mythological figure and temporal experience, while also exploring
the social and cultural aspects of nighttime events. Professor Catherine
Keane of Washington University in St. Louis will deliver the keynote
address. We welcome submissions from diverse fields and disciplines.
Possible areas of investigation include, but are not limited to:

– Night as a deity or personification depicted in literature
and/or art
– Night as a social construction, e.g. as holy or unholy, as a time for
transgressive activities; the way that night affects conceptions of time
– Dreams, whether true or false, and inspiration that comes at night; poets,
philosophers, storytellers, and others who work through the night
– Religious aspects of night: for example, rites which only happen at night,
incubation
– Nighttime activities such as symposia and paraclausithyra
– Practical advantages and disadvantages of night: night raids, banditry,
intrigue
– Means of illuminating the night both natural and artificial: streetlamps,
constellations, the moon
– Night in similes and metaphors
– Transitions into and out of night at dusk and dawn; the false night which
occurs during eclipses and storms

Papers should be 15-20 minutes in length. Please send abstracts of no more
than 300 words to Jennifer LaFleur (jll4x AT virginia.edu) by February 1, 2013.

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The Centre for Oratory and Rhetoric (COR), Royal Holloway, University of
London, announces an international conference entitled From Antiphon to
Autocue: Speechwriting Ancient and Modern to take place at RHUL’s central
London venue in Bedford Square on 25 and 26 of April 2013.

Confirmed speakers include experts on ancient Greek and Roman logography
and oratory: Prof. Chris Carey (UCL), Prof. Mike Edwards (Lampeter), Prof.
Michael Gagarin (Texas), Prof. Catherine Steel (Glasgow). They will be
joined by an expert on modern media and communications, Prof. Andrew
Tolson (De Montfort), a modern historian specializing in Churchill’s
oratory, Professor Richard Toye (Exeter), and a modern speechwriter, Simon
Lancaster.

We welcome proposals for papers on any aspect of speechwriting ancient,
medieval, or modern (30-40 mins. duration). Please send your proposal to
antiphon2autocue AT gmail.com by 31 January 2013 at the latest.

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‘Greek Literary Epigram: From the Hellenistic to the Byzantine Era’

An international conference to be held at University College London, 11 – 13
September 2013.

Recent scholarship has witnessed an escalating interest in the study of
Greek literary epigram, which was given further momentum by the discovery
and publication of the New Milan Papyrus, attributed to Posidippus of Pella.
Considerable progress has been made in our appreciation of the development
and features of the genre and its exponents in the Hellenistic period.
However, intense scholarly focus on Hellenistic epigram has led to an
under-appreciation of the later epigrammatic material, from the Roman to the
Byzantine period. The aim of this international conference is to investigate
the changes that literary epigram underwent over the centuries, its
interrelationship with other Greek literary genres and with the visual arts,
as well as the factors which influenced its development across time. In this
way the conference aims to advance our understanding of the epigram by
shifting focus away from an author-, garland,- and time-based study of
epigrams and exploring Greek literary epigrams – from the Hellenistic to
those included in the Cycle of Agathias – in a wider perspective, leading to
the understanding of the larger dynamics that shaped the epigram as a
literary type, and the factors that influenced its development and
guaranteed its survival throughout antiquity.

The list of confirmed speakers includes:
Prof. Silvia Barbantani (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore)
Prof. Peter Bing (Emory)
Prof. Joseph Day (Wabash College)
Prof. Marco Fantuzzi (Columbia)
Dr. Lucia Floridi (Milan)
Dr. Valentina Garulli (Bologna)
Prof. Kathryn Gutzwiller (Cincinnati)
Prof. Annette Harder (Groningen)
Dr. Regina Hoeschele (Toronto)
Prof. Richard Hunter (Cambridge)
Prof. Irmgard Maennlein-Robert (Tübingen)
Dr. Doris Meyer (Strasbourg)
Dr. Andrej Petrovic (Durham)

Please submit your title and abstract (up to one page A4), along with your
personal data (name, affiliation, email) until the 30th of March 2013 via
email to the following address: m.kanellou AT ucl.ac.uk.

Possible subjects for papers include, but are not limited to:
-Contextualisation of literary epigrams of different periods within their
religious, political, and geographical milieu
-Cross-fertilisation between different epigrammatic subgenres
-Poetic rivalry and imitation
-Intertextuality
-Poetic voice in different epigrammatists and subgenres
-Development of poetic topoi within the genre
-Mythic and other narrative modes
-Interrelation between epigrams and inscriptions
-Epigrams and patronage
-Epigrams and iconography
-Epigrams, anthologies, and performative context

The organising committee,

Maria Kanellou
Ivana Petrovic
Chris Carey