Classics Lecture Schedule

Ellen and Charles S. La Follette Lecture: 

"We Are Shaped by Space": Some Archaeological Perspectives on the Materiality of Black Life

Dr. Whitney Battle-Baptiste
Director, WEB Du Bois Center
Professor, Department of Anthropology
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

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Date: Thursday, April 18, 2024
Time: 5:30 p.m.
Location: Herter Hall 227, UMass Amherst

For Zoom attendance, register here: https://tinyurl.com/2xcu7ntk

Annual Grose Lecture: Central Italian Urbanism in the Age of the Roman Expansion

Nicola Terrenato, University of Michigan

Date: Thursday, April 25
Time: 5:30 p.m.
Location: Campus Center 163c (1st Floor), UMass Amherst

The urbanization of the Italian peninsula happened in two major waves in the course of the first millennium BCE. In the ninth through sixth centuries, cities developed apace, dotting the Tyrrhenian and Ionic coasts, while also pushing inland in Latium and especially in Etruria. Another massive wave happened in the fourth through second centuries, the same period in which the Roman expansion in Italy was unfolding. While the scholarly focus has long been on the colonies created by Rome in this period, archaeological work has been showing that those foundations are only a facet of a much broader trend toward urbanization, which produced an integrated urban system spanning the entire length of Italy and reaching across the entire central Mediterranean. The relationship with the political unification of the peninsula, long believed to be the prime mover, is particularly entangled and open to different interpretations. The new urbanism had distinctive features and even shortcomings, especially when compared with contemporary Greek cities. When recent archaeological results are pieced together, a fascinating embryology of Italian urbanism comes into view.

Nicola Terrenato is the Esther B. Van Deman Collegiate Professor of Roman Studies at the University of Michigan, and director of the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology.

Reception to follow.