Identity

2013
Livingston, Ivy J. 2013. “Classical to the Core: Latin as the Lynchpin to the Goals of the Standards.” American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. Abstract

This session will illustrate project-based activities in which students become the makers of objects and texts that are shared not only among each other, but with their schools and communities. The projects and their Roman models (monuments, coins) will provide a lens through which students will engage with “big” issues of civic identity and image.

2005
Romulus' Asylum: Roman Identities from the Age of Alexander to the Age of Hadrian

Modern treatments of Rome have projected in highly emotive terms the perceived problems, or the aspirations, of the present: 'race-mixture' has been blamed for the collapse of the Roman empire; more recently, Rome and Roman society have been depicted as 'multicultural'. Moving beyond these and beyond more traditional, juridical approaches to Roman identity, Emma Dench focuses on ancient modes of thinking about selves and relationships with other peoples, including descent-myths, history, and ethnographies. She explores the relative importance of sometimes closely interconnected categories of blood descent, language, culture and clothes, and territoriality. Rome's creation of a distinctive imperial shape is understood in the context of the broader ancient Mediterranean world within which the Romans self-consciously situated themselves, and whose modes of thought they appropriated and transformed.