Category: News

Helen Morales to Give a Talk at SBMA

Emilio Capettini

On Sunday, May 31st, at 11am, Professor Helen Morales will give a talk titled “Collages of the Classical: The Hallucinatory Brilliance of Elliott Hundley” at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. In her talk, Professor Morales will address art in the exhibition By Achilles’ Tomb: Elliott Hundley and Antiquity @ SBMA  and will discuss how Hundley uses Greek myth to comment on contemporary concerns. She will consider stories about the tomb of the tragic hero Achilles, and make comparisons between Hundley’s art and the recent collages of Kara Walker and Lynne Huffer, which also use the classical to raise urgent contemporary questions.

Admission is free for students with a valid ID. Tickets for the talk can be reserved here.

 

Annie Lamar and Julio Vega-Payne Win an IHC Faculty Collaborative Award

Emilio Capettini

Prof. Lamar and Prof. Vega-Payne have won one of the Faculty Collaborative Awards offered by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center for their project titled “Ancient Voices, Modern Landscapes: An Environmental Humanities Showcase.” 

This project will create a dual-format environmental humanities showcase (digital and physically displayed) pairing short passages from ancient Mediterranean texts with contemporary environmental media. Prof. Lamar and Prof. Vega-Payne will produce 5-7 curated “eco-diptychs” that will illuminate how ecological knowledge circulates across time. Each diptych will feature a brief ancient passage on themes such as agriculture, water scarcity, flood narratives, wildfire, extraction, or environmental transformation, alongside modern material such as wildfire severity maps, sea-level-rise projections, satellite images of drought, photographs of local degradation, or visualized biodiversity and pollution datasets. Each pairing will include a 200-300 word interpretive commentary.

Congratulations, Annie and Julio!

Helen Morales headshot

Helen Morales delivers J.H. Gray Lectures at Cambridge

Rose MacLean

Professor Helen Morales will deliver the prestigious J.H. Gray Lectures at Cambridge University, May 13-15, 2025. The lecture series was established in 1928 by an endowment from Reverend J.H. Gray, a former Fellow and Vice-President of Queens’ College, and canon of Peterborough. Professor Morales’ Gray Lectures will showcase her pathbreaking research on Modern Art, Race, and Ancient Fiction, including lectures entitled “Re-encountering antiquity with Harmonia Rosales: classical education and aesthetic dissent” and “Meeting Apollo and Daphne again: theorizing race through the art of Firelei Báez,” and a seminar on “Beyond metaphor. somatic transformations in Heliodorus, Aesop and Homer.”

Poster featuring Helen Morales’ Gray Lectures

Helen Morales has been awarded an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University

Emilio Capettini

The Faculty of Languages of Uppsala University has appointed Helen Morales as honorary doctor. As they note in their press release, Helen “writes about the ancient world and its reception in modern times for both subject experts and the broader public” and “has thus become one of the most important voices in classical studies of the decade.” 

Congratulations, Helen!

Congratulations, Class of 2024!

Emilio Capettini

The Classics Department is delighted to celebrate the majors who successfully completed their undergraduate studies this year: Eric Banuelos, Nia Correal, Lisbeth Gil, Bryanna Harrell, Monserrat Hernandez, Elijah Holton, Shannon Mayo, Amanda Orza, Eduardo Ruiz Felix, Michelle Woo.

Congratulations, graduates!

Helen Morales to Deliver Prestigious Martin Lectures at Oberlin College main art cropped

Helen Morales to Deliver Prestigious Martin Lectures at Oberlin College

Emilio Capettini

From October 30 to November 3, 2023, Helen Morales, the Argyropoulos Professor of Hellenic Studies, will deliver the 2023-2024 Charles Bebee Martin Lectures at Oberlin College. Established in honor of Charles Bebee Martin, who taught Classics and classical archaeology at Oberlin College for forty-five years, these lectures are among the most prestigious in the field of Classics worldwide.

Professor Morales’ lecture series is titled “Art, Activism, and Ancient Fiction” and includes the following presentations:

  • Monday, October 30: “Re-encountering antiquity with Harmonia Rosales”
  • Tuesday, October 31: “Aesop, slavery, and queer kinship”
  • Thursday, November 2: “Riddles of incest”
  • Friday, November 3: “Heliodorus’ blackness”  

 

More information about the Martin Lectures can be found here. 

 

 

two mold of faces next to each other

Volume on Classics & Queer Theory Co-Edited by Sara Lindheim Just Published!

Emilio Capettini

The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Queer Theory, edited by our own Sara Lindheim with Ella Haselswerdt (UCLA) and Kirk Ormand (Oberlin College), has just been published. The volume, which convenes an international group of experts working on the classical world and queer theory and features an expansive array of methodologies applied to the interdisciplinary field of Classics, seeks to explore the vast – and increasingly uncharted – intersections of the queer and the classical.

More information, including a detailed table of contents, can be found here.    

Congratulations, Sara!

Painting of Woman with her hair wrapped up in a pink cloth

Exhibition Curated by Helen Morales Covered on CNN!

Emilio Capettini

The exhibition “Harmonia Rosales: Master Narrative,” currently on display at the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta, has received coverage on CNN. The exhibition is an expanded and transformed version of “Harmonia Rosales: Entwined,” which was conceived and curated by Helen Morales, the Argyropoulos Professor of Hellenic Studies in our Classics Department, and was first shown at UCSB’s AD&A Museum in 2022. 

The exhibition features paintings by the Afro-Cuban American artist Harmonia Rosales that put Yòrúba and Greek mythologies in dialogue, prompting discussions about about traditions,
eurocentrism, racism, memory, and institutional responsibility, in and beyond many Humanities
disciplines, as well as in the public sphere.

The earlier version of the exhibition had already attracted international attention: it was reviewed on the well-known on-line journal Hyperallergic and covered in Mary Beard’s blog for the Times Literary Supplement.

Congratulations, Helen!

 

Chris Erdman in front of a background of Rome

Chris Erdman Wins Rome Prize

Rose MacLean

Chris Erdman, a PhD student in our Ancient History emphasis, has been selected as one of five Rome Prize recipients in Ancient Studies for 2023-24. During his fellowship in Rome, Chris will work on his dissertation, a “citizen’s-eye view” of the Republican legislative process entitled Voting Culture and Political Theater in Late Republican Lawmaking. Chris’ research and achievements are featured in the UCSB Current. Congratulations, Chris!