In Process

Events

In Process

a new works-in-progress seminar featuring Taft Center and Classics fellows with invited interlocutors and pre-circulated drafts. Advanced registration required.

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February 20 | Anna Conser with Patrick Burns | Accent Patterns in Tragic Lyric: A Computational Study

"Accent Patterns in Tragic Lyric: A Computational Study”
draft chapter from an in-progress monograph

The choral odes of ancient Greek tragedies were originally created as song-and-dance numbers, combining words, music and dance in what ancient critics considered a single medium: choreia. The music for tragic odes was not written down, but my research suggests that the lyric texts themselves preserve hidden information about their melodic settings. Several studies have investigated how linguistic pitch accents are rendered melodically in the ancient songs that survive with music notation, identifying several widespread principles by which composers coordinated the intonation of the lyrics with the sung melody. As part of my on-going research into tragic music, I have created software that can apply these principles to texts preserved without music notation. My work-in-progress is the second chapter of a monograph addressing what this new data can tell us about the musical design of Greek tragedy. In this chapter, I present the results of a computational study of pitch accent patterns in the lyrics of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. My preliminary results provide new evidence for the development of early Greek music, and expose several specific patterns relevant to the literary interpretation of Greek tragedy’s lyric texts.

Register here: https://taft.center/3ExhNLK

Anna Conser is a philologist specializing in Greek literature. Her current research focusses on ancient music and performance, Greek drama and lyric poetry, and the digital processing of ancient texts. As part of her first book project, she has developed software tools to analyze the melodic patterning of pitch accents in Greek choral lyric. This new melodic evidence for Greek choral odes allows her to interpret ancient tragedy using approaches borrowed from opera and musical theater. Dr. Conser’s work on performance is informed by extensive experience as a director, composer, and choreographer for modern productions of ancient plays

Patrick J. Burns is Associate Research Scholar, Digital Projects at NYU's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World working in ancient-world data processing and historical language text mining and analysis. Patrick earned his doctorate in Classics from Fordham University in 2016 and has since been active in the area of computational philology. Patrick is the maintainer of the LatinCy, pretrained natural language processing pipelines for Latin, a co-author/developer for LatinBERT, and has been a contributor to the Classical Language Toolkit. Recent publications include "(Re)Active Latin: Computational Chat as Future Colloquia" for the New England Classical Journal looks at the pedagogical implications of using large language models and chatbots in the Latin classroom as well as a blog post "How Much Latin Does ChatGPT "Know"?" exploring the Latin-language training data of OpenAI's popular AI. This year he co-taught a graduate seminar at ISAW on uses of generative artificial intelligence in humanities research.

April 3 | Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara with Margaret Chowning, Berkeley | Apocalypse Now: Maya Marianism, Female Prophecy, and Rebellion

Apocalypse Now: Maya Marianism, Female Prophecy, and Rebellion

In the summer of 1712, María López, a teenage Maya girl in the Chiapas highlands, proclaimed to have spoken with an apparition of the Virgin Mary who told her that Spanish colonialism would soon end. By early August, thousands of Maya “soldiers of the Virgin,” rose up in the Tzeltal Revolt, one of the largest and most radical Indigenous revolts in Spanish America before 1750. Throughout the rebellion, María López continued to relay the Virgin’s directives, dressed in priestly vestments, and presided alongside newly ordained Maya Catholic priests. Lopez could neither read nor write, but I argue she acted as an Indigenous intellectual, navigating gender restrictions and establishing her prophetic authority through a keen awareness of the sociopolitical context of Chiapas’ Maya highlands and creative intellectual engagement with European and Maya Christian prophetic traditions.

Register here: https://taft.center/3Q0ACcY

Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara is a 2024–25 Taft Center Fellow. She teaches Latin American History, specializing in the colonial period and nineteenth century. Her research focuses on gender and religion in colonial and nineteenth-century Central America. Her book, Alone at the Altar: Single Women and Devotion in Guatemala, 1670-1870 (Stanford University Press, 2018), considers how non-elite single women forged complex alliances with the Catholic Church in Guatemala's colonial capital, and how those alliances significantly shaped local religion and the spiritual economy, late colonial reform efforts, and post-Independence politics. Her new book project, The Virgin's Wrath, examines gender relations, Mayan Catholicism, and violence in eighteenth-century Chiapas. She teaches survey courses on colonial Latin America as well as upper division courses on topics such as gender, religion, the Spanish Inquisition, and Afro-Latin America.

Margaret Chowning is the Muriel McKevitt Sonne Chair Professor of Latin American History (emerita) at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Wealth and Power in Provincial Mexico from the Late Colony to the Revolution (Stanford, 1999), Rebellious Nuns: The Troubled History of a Mexican Convent (Oxford, 2006), and Catholic Women and Mexican Politics, 1750-1940 (Princeton, 2023). She is working on a book of urban history in Mexico, with special attention to the impact that liberal policies and liberal “values” exerted on urban life in the nineteenth century.

April 10 | Amy Lind with Margaret Power | Anti-Fascist Solidarity Movements and Political Memory in Authoritarian Chile, 1970-1980s

Anti-Fascist Solidarity Movements and Political Memory in Authoritarian Chile, 1970-1980s

This paper is an introduction to my book on memory practices in Chile, 1970-2025. I begin with a story about my aunt Dr. Amy Conger, whose life and work in Chile is at the center of my analysis of Chile during and after the dictatorship (1973-1990). Her story provides an entry into my broader analysis of Cold War-era internationalism, or international solidarity, during democratically-elected, socialist Salvador Allende’s presidency (1970-1973) and during the subsequent military dictatorship (1973-1990). In particular, I focus on the organized Left’s resistance, as this is the context in which Amy Conger’s political work took place. Her story also offers an entry point to reflect on political memory practices in Chile over the past 50+ years. There are many examples of how memory practices centered on state authoritarianism and violence (e.g., reparative acts of memorialization, art and visual cultures, social/cultural movements), reflect what was learned from groups actively opposed to fascism, over 30,000 of whom were disappeared, imprisoned, tortured, and/or executed (some estimate over 50,000).

Conceptually, I emphasize how Chilean (and other) scholars have developed a theory of violence and power as embedded in postcolonial governance, economic development, affect, and space. I ask, what can we learn from these earlier struggles, which took place during a time of extreme polarity and state oppression? Later in my book project, I also ask, how do these memories of the nation’s past inform, impede, and sometimes transform contemporary understandings of the nation’s future? As I weave personal storytelling into a broader analysis of anti-authoritarian resistance and memory practices, I take up questions of method, interpretation, viewpoint, and truth.

Register here: https://taft.center/3CCk7Re

Amy Lind is a 2024-25 Taft Center Fellow and a scholar of politics and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. She has specialized in Andean politics and epistemes, global governance, international political economy, critical development studies, transnational feminisms, and queer/cuir decolonial and indigenous studies. She is the author of Gendered Paradoxes: Women’s Movements and the Politics of Global Development in Ecuador (Penn State Press 2005) and editor of four anthologies including Development, Sexual Rights and Global Governance (Routledge 2010). She is the author of numerous articles, book chapters, and editorials, including a forthcoming chapter on plurinational politics in Ecuador in María Lugones and Patrick Crowley, eds. Decolonial Thinking: Resistant Meanings and Communal Other-Sense (Indiana UP 2025). Currently she is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Feminist Journal of Politics.

Margaret Power is a professor of history who focuses on Latin America, women, and gender. Her earlier work explored why a large number of Chilean women opposed the socialist government of Salvador Allende (1970-73) and supported the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). She also explored various expressions of the global and transnational Right. She recently co-authored a book on Norvelt, a New Deal community in southwest Pennsylvania named for Eleanor Roosevelt. She is currently writing a book titled Solidarity across the Americas: The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party vs. U.S. Colonialism.

April 17 | Siham Bouamer with Denis M. Provencher, North Carolina State | Globalizing Moroccan Culture: Identity, Representation, and Cultural Flows

Globalizing Moroccan Culture: Identity, Representation, and Cultural Flows

Scholarship on Morocco’s position in global networks has largely focused on economic and socio-political structures, yet cultural production plays a critical role in shaping transnational identities. In conversation with Denis Provencher, Siham Bouamer will explore how Moroccan cultural phenomena—cinema, literature, music, and sports—circulate globally and contribute to ongoing negotiations of identity, authenticity, and power. While global markets often celebrate cultural diversity, they also risk commodifying it and prioritizing accessibility for external audiences over the integrity of local practices. Drawing on theoretical perspectives in decolonial studies, this discussion will interrogate the tensions between cultural representation and global power structures. The conversation will examine how Moroccan cultural actors navigate and challenge dominant narratives and offer new perspectives on the intersections of globalization, identity, and cultural hierarchies in the contemporary world.

Register here: https://taft.center/4hEYsGN

Siham Bouamer is a French and Francophone studies scholar specializing in colonial and postcolonial literatures and films. Her research expertise primarily focuses on travel writing and imperialism, as well as migration and belonging in contemporary France. Her approaches to these fields are extensively informed by theories and methodologies emerging from affect, cultural, gender, and queer studies.

Dr. Denis M. Provencher is Associate Dean for Interdisciplinary Affairs and Partnerships and Professor of French and Francophone Studies at NC State University. He also serves as editor-in-chief of the interdisciplinary journals Contemporary French Civilization (CFC) and CFC Intersections, published by Liverpool University Press. Dr. Provencher is the author of Queer French: Globalization, Language, and Sexual Citizenship in France (Ashgate/Routledge, 2007) and Queer Maghrebi French: Language, Temporalities, Transfiliations, (Liverpool UP, 2017). With Dr. Siham Bouamer, he has co-edited the volume Abdellah Taïa's Queer Migrations: Non-Places, Affect, and Temporalities (Lexington Books, 2021). He is currently finishing a new co-edited volume, Queer Realms of Memory: Archiving LGBTQ Sites and Symbols in the French National Narrative (Liverpool UP), with Dr. Siham Bouamer and Dr. Ryan Schroth.