2027 Graduate Student Conference
Frontiers and Borders in the Ancient World
The graduate students of the Department of Classics at Harvard University are pleased to announce the return of our biennial Graduate Student Conference. The theme this year will be “Frontiers and Borders in the Ancient World.” The conference will take place in person on March 4–5, 2027 in Cambridge, MA. Verity Platt, Professor of Classics at Cornell University, will deliver the keynote address.
In selecting our theme, we aspired to represent our commitment to a vision of the ancient Mediterranean in its full spatial extent and temporal richness—from the Bronze Age to the Byzantine Period—and to encompass a range of methodological perspectives drawn from the various disciplines constituting Classics and Ancient Studies. We envision our conference as a platform for current graduate students, especially those in the Greater Boston Area, to at once present their work and be exposed to methodologies and issues outside their fields of specialty. Therefore, we welcome contributions that engage with the themes of the conference to show how the same issues can be fruitfully studied from a variety of meaningful approaches.
Topic areas might include, but are not limited to:
Trade and travel (travel literature, objects in motion, exchange of ideas and materials)
Encounters (cartography, treaties, innovation and the new)
Physical frontiers and borders (forts and outposts, imagistic framing, margins)
Universalism (world literature, natural history, universal histories, verisimilitude)
Multilingualism and multiculturalism (ethnographies, dialects, translation, provincial studies, literature of exile, diaspora)
Transformation (eschatology, crisis, decline, rites de passage)
Disciplinary frontiers (digital humanities, epistemological borders)
The keynote address will be delivered on the first evening of the conference, Thursday, March 4. The graduate papers will be delivered the following day, Friday, March 5. Each speaker will have 30 minutes at their disposal: 20 minutes of presentation followed by 10 minutes of discussion. Presentations will take place in person, and we are pleased to be able to cover the cost of accommodation for all speakers, but participants are responsible for their own travel expenses.
Those interested in delivering a paper should submit an abstract to the Organizing Committee using this Google Form by November 22, 2026. Candidates will be asked to provide their name, affiliation, and year of study. The abstracts should be max. 250 words in length and include a title. Students should expect a notification regarding our selection by December 20, 2026. Please contact us at harvardgradconf@gmail.com if you have any questions or concerns.