ESP Biography

Was being bisexual the norm in Ancient Greece? Was there a transgender Roman emperor? Can we and should we label historical figures as gay, bi, trans, etc. if they lived in a culture that didn't have those concepts? What kind of documents from the ancient Mediterranean world do we have about LGBTQ people? In this class we'll read some primary sources together, ranging from lesbian love poems to transphobic tirades (in English translation!). We'll discuss what these texts can tell us about how people in the ancient Mediterranean thought about same-gender attraction and gender nonconformity. In the process we'll have opportunities to think about identity, the purposes of connecting the ancient to the modern, the relationship between texts and the societies they come from, and the interpretive biases of scholars.

All across Europe and the Mediterranean, archaeologists have found small metal tablets with curses inscribed on them. These tablets, listing wishes for horrible things to happen to a particular person, were made by ancient Greeks, Romans, and their contemporaries. Why did people make these? What can they tell us about ancient societies, religious practices, and everyday life? Why are there words on them that nobody understands? In this class I'll teach you about all this and more, you'll practice looking at evidence and thinking about it like a historian, and we'll all make our own model curse tablets.

100 years ago, English-speakers spoke a little differently from how they do today. 1000 years ago, they spoke so differently that we wouldn't be able to understand them. 4000 years ago, the English language shared a common ancestor with most of the modern languages of Europe and northern India. How does that happen? In this class, you'll learn a few things about historical linguistics, the field that studies how and why languages change over time. I'll explain the basics of sound change and some grammatical changes, and I'll talk about the ways that people can tell whether different languages are related to each other and what languages were like thousands of years ago, even when they weren't written down.