Monuments and Memory

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

As the current controversy over Confederate statues shows, commemorative monuments matter. As we will discover in this course, public commemoration was a politically charged issue already in Greek and Roman antiquity, and monuments did not remain static. We will examine selected Greek and Roman monuments with an eye toward their symbolic vocabularies, political messages, and evolving physical contexts. Topics will include: Greek commemorations of the Persian Wars; honorific portraits of individuals; monuments of Roman emperors; and the removal of monuments. Class meetings will feature discussion of assigned readings (50-100 pages per week). Students will write short preliminary papers and serve as discussion co-leaders. Each student will choose an individual research topic; during the final weeks of the semester, students will give oral reports on their topics to the class, and at the end of the semester each student will submit a 20-page final paper. Comments: