This year’s European Gender Studies in Antiquity Network (EuGeStA) conference will take place from the 3rd to the 4th of June 2022 at the University of Toronto and the Jackman Humanities Institute. The papers delivered will be focused on this year’s theme, “Women Collectives in Classical Antiquity (and Beyond)”.
From the social networks of aristocratic women to the mythological networks imagined by classical authors, from religious sisterhoods to political protests, and from medical practitioners to sex workers, women’s collectives and networks, literary associations and communities in the ancient world were multiform and complex.
How were women in the ancient world represented as banding together and why? In teaming up, how did membership of a collective affect a woman’s own agency and standing – what were the advantages and disadvantages of group membership?
How can we understand the balance of interests between social collectives and literary representations of them?
When we know of ancient women’s existence only through their membership in a collection of writings, how do we know them as an individuals? What is the role of the compiler who collected women’s works or the author who ventriloquized their voices? What kind of reception have classical women’s collectives spurred in art, literature and politics? How have representations of Sappho’s school, for example, or the Amazons informed women’s
artistic and political movements?
Program
3 June 2022
9:00 am – Morning Coffee
9:45 am – Welcome
Alison Keith, University of Toronto
Victoria Wohl, Chair, Department of Classics, University of Toronto
Allison Glazebrook, Classical Association of Canada
Session One – Chair, Alison Keith
10:00 am – Jacqueline Fabre-Serris, “Les relations ‘nouvelles’ entre femmes et hommes chez les Amazones: les reconfigurations du mythe chez Strabon, Kleist et Wittig et leur contexte social”
10:45 am – Sarah Blake, “The Sibyls: A Complex Collectivity”
11:30 am –Judith Hallett, “‘Classical Journal Club of Vassar College Meets at Macurdy’s,’ April 14, 1925: a Women’s Research Collective and Gendered Approaches to the Study of Classical Antiquity in the 20th century US”
12:15 pm – Lunch
Session Two – Chair, Mariapia Pietropaolo
1:30 pm – Stephanie Dennie, “Female Community in Alkman’s Partheneion and the Socio-political Importance of Proper Marriage in Archaic and Classical Sparta”
2:15 pm – Allison Glazebrook, “Female Networks in Attic Oratory: A Case Study”
3:00 pm – Giulia Sissa, “We, the Women. The Challenge of the Other Plural”
4:00 pm – Afternoon Tea
Session Three – Keynote Lecture
Chair, Allison Glazebrook
5:00 pm – Judith Fletcher (WLU), “Euripides and Women’s Ritual Collectives”
6:15 pm – Reception
4 June 2022
9:00 am – Morning Coffee
Session Four – Chair, Georgia Ferentinou
10:00 am – Henriette Schwarzbauer-Harich, “Arachne and her ‘sisters’: Weaving and Web-working”
10:45 am – Mariapia Pietropaolo, “Nymphs Between Nature and Art in Ovid’s Metamorphoses”
11:30 am – Lucy Mudie, “Ovid’s virgines infelices: Byblis, Myrrha and Pasiphae”
12:30 pm – Lunch
Session Five – Chair, Sarah Blake
2:00 pm – Juliana Will, “The Roving Horde: Travelling Female Choruses in Athenian Tragedy”
2:45 pm – Alison Sharrock, “Accompanied by a Large Crowd: Female Attendants in Latin poetry”
3:30 pm – Georgia Ferentinou, “Similes inter seclude puellas: Mothers, Lovers, and Female Collectives in Statius’ Achilleid”
4:30 pm – Reception
