Continuing Education Course Finder: CLACS01-1a

Sex, Power, and Politics: Women in Ancient Rome (CLACS01-1a)

Status: Closed

Fee: $150.00

Timing: 4 sessions from February 8, 2010 - March 8, 2010 on day TBD. Look for this class in Spring 2010!

Course Description: State heroes, tragic victims, vicious poisoners, passive pawns, and ambitious power-players—these are just a few of the descriptions ancient writers and modern scholars apply to the famous women of Roman history. Roman women are a paradox: with little actual legal power they frequently acted behind the scenes, leaving ancient and modern historians to separate sensational truth from scandalous fiction as they reconstruct how they wielded their power.

Women with political ambition throughout time have been judged according to ancient and unwritten codes of conduct. In our own recent history, a female presidential candidate was criticized both for her ambition and for her husband’s past infidelity, while on the other side a vice-presidential candidate was chosen for her small-town values and family-oriented personality. Participants in this course will come away with knowledge of Roman history and will explore the roots of these still-prevalent biases against powerful women, study their effect on the way history continues to be written and examine the way in which their legacy still influences our idea of a woman’s place in politics today.

Instructor(s): Lauren Donovan

Instructor(s) Bio: Lauren Donovan is a Ph.D. candidate in Latin and Greek literature at Brown University with a focus on the literature, history, and visual culture of the early Roman Empire, especially concerning representation of power, family, and women. She graduated from Cornell University in 2003 summa cum laude with a B.A. in Classics. Before coming to Brown in 2005, she taught Latin at the high-school level. Her current primary research interests include the poetry of the Julio-Claudian age (44 BC-AD68), historiography, and the representations of and allusions to the historical tradition in Roman poetry. She also has related interests in Art History and the interaction between art and text. Lauren has also conducted research abroad in Rome and Greece, and presented her work at several national and international conferences. She expects to graduate in 2011.