Date: Saturday and Sunday, May 6 – 7
The Center for Hellenic Studies is excited to welcome Fall 2022 Fellows and other esteemed scholars back to campus for Wonder: A Workshop on the State of the Question.
This workshop aims to explore two things: how different genres and knowledge domains in Greek antiquity over time harnessed the concept of wonder (e.g., philosophy, art history, poetry, religion, and medicine), and how different subfields in Classics and in adjacent disciplines conceptualize wonder as a valuable analytical category.
This event is for registered participants only. Registration is now closed.
More information on this upcoming workshop can be found below:
The study of wonder in antiquity has reached a crossroads. On the one hand, there is extraordinary momentum in the study of wonder in contemporary scholarship. There has been a variety of publications on wonder literature from various angles, much of which has been published by the potential participants of this proposed workshop: wonders and miracles (Gerolemou); paradoxography (Yu); medicine and paradoxography (Kazantzidis); and wonder in Hellenistic Jewish literature (Leventhal). On the other hand, different scholars with different interests and working on different texts have construed wonder and its cultural import in distinct and sometimes contradictory ways. The heterogeneity of this recent scholarly output requires collective reconsideration to take stock of the value of such a concept in the various subfields of Classics and how we might move forward.
This two-day workshop will look backward and forwards. More than twenty-five years have passed since the publication of Delcroix and Schepens’ important pair of essays on wonder in Graeco-Roman antiquity (1996) and Prier’s ambitious study on the phenomenology of wonder in Greek literature (1989), and more than sixty years since Giannini’s foundational articles on paradoxography (1963; 1964). After the recent upswing in scholarship on wonder, the time is therefore ripe to evaluate how we have moved on from the observations of Delcroix, Schepens, Prier, and Giannini. It is also the right time to ask where the field goes next. What are some potential research avenues going forward for the study of wonder in antiquity? What wider trends can the study of wonder draw from or contribute to? What are the theoretical centers of gravity that bind together these different modern scholarly discourses on wonder?