75th anniversary of FIEC – lecture series
Program of the second series of lectures (April-June 2024)

For abstracts, see following pages.
Links for the online lecture will be available shortly.
Please refer to the FIEC website at https://www.fiecnet.org/75-years-fiec

Thursday 11 April 2024

19h00 CEST

Prof. Filippomaria Pontani
Venezia/Italy
Vingt-quatre pattes de mouche : Greek manuscripts and beyond

Thursday 25 April 2024
Prof. Joy Connolly
Beyond “Greece and Rome”

Thursday 9 May 2024

Language

American Council of Learned Societies

ENGLISH19h00 CEST

Language19h00 CEST

Prof. Denis Rousset
École pratique des hautes études, Sorbonne
Comment publier les inscriptions grecques et latines au XXIe s. ?

Thursday 13 June 2024

ENGLISH19h00 CEST

Prof. Carmen Codoñer
Salamanca/Spain
Humanismo: transiciones. Texto y contexto

Thursday 23 May 2024

Language

19h00 CESTSPANISH

Language
FRENCH

LanguageProf. Stefan Rebenich
Berne/Switzerland
ENGLISH“Alte Geschichte in Forschung und Lehre”: A very brief survey of the development of Ancient History
in Germany over the last fifty years

Filippomaria Pontani
Professor of Classical Philology at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

Abstract
Vingt-quatre pattes de mouche : Greek manuscripts and beyond
Studies of Greek manuscripts and Greek manuscript culture have made enormous leaps forward in recentdecades. While academic practice tends to parcel off Altertumswissenschaft by allotting special inquiries topalaeographers, papyrologists, philologists, historians of culture, Byzantinists etc., only the fruitfulinteraction between these disciplines can enable significant progress in the recovery, the edition and theinterpretation of ancient and medieval Greek literature and wisdom. Incidentally, this approach is not only
paramount for textual criticism, but it also has much to tell about phenomena of reception andappropriation that have shaped the Classical heritage throughout the centuries.

Filippomaria Pontani is Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Venice Ca’ Foscari, and a memberof the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome. While primarily concerned with scholarship and manuscripttransmission in the Byzantine and humanistic period (from Plutarch’s Natural Questions to Planudes’ editionof Ptolemy, down to Pletho’s De Homero), he is currently editing the scholia to Homer’s Odyssey (fivevolumes so far, 2007–2022; prolegomena: Sguardi su Ulisse, 2005). He has published extensively on Greekand Latin texts (from Sappho’s Nachleben to Callimachus’ Aitia, from Aeschylus’ Choephori toEuripides’ Medea, from the rise of ancient grammar to allegory and the literary facies of some ancientmyths) as well as on Byzantine, Humanist (Poliziano’s Liber Epigrammatum Graecorum, 2002;
Kondoleon’s Scritti omerici, 2018; the anthology of "neualtgriechische Gedichte" The Hellenizing Muse, 2022,ed. with Stefan Weise) and Modern Greek literature (Poeti greci del Novecento, 2010). He co-directs (with S.
Valente) the Sammlung der gr. und lat. Grammatiker, (with Alberto Camerotto) the project Classici
Contro, and (with Anna Santoni) a series of modern receptions of Classical myth (last issue: a piece by W.
Mouawad, Pisa 2023).
https://www.unive.it/data/people/5592491

Joy Connolly
President of the American Council of Learned Societies

Abstract
Beyond “Greece and Rome”
In this lecture, I argue for a thorough rethinking of the field we now call “classical studies,” based on a criticalevaluation of its historical structure and founding values. I propose a redesigned discipline constituted incollaboration with scholars of the deep past in other regions of the world. This new configuration would
transcend the nineteenth-century protonationalist borders of “Classics” (Altertumswissenschaft) and speak
to the needs of our interconnected, global age while preserving the skills required to understand cultures far
distant from ours in time and space, including the study of ancient languages.
My reasoning runs along two tracks. First, the professionalized study of Greece and Rome is the product of auniversity and disciplinary system centuries in the making that placed Europe at the center of inquiry. Its
intentional focus on what I call “GreeceandRome” shut out consideration of other ancient cultures, andtoday still warps our effort to understand ancient history and cultural and intellectual production. Recentefforts in the US to push against the GreeceandRome paradigm by renaming departments “AncientMediterranean and Near Eastern Studies” and the like typically represent accretions of a few scholars andcourses, not a significant reorientation of vision and goals. Transregional, transcultural, and translinguistic
studies beyond Latin and Greek continue to be marginalized in favor of scholarship on familiar canonicaltexts.
Meanwhile, the contemporary audience for these canonical texts is decreasing in size, and this is the second
reason I advocate for a global approach to the study of ancient pasts. Across the United States,
undergraduate enrollments in the study of all ancient cultures are flat or declining, the number of tenure
track jobs is shrinking, and departments in less wellresourced institutions are getting smaller or forcibly
amalgamated. Calls from the left to burn down the house of classical scholarship are growing louder; callsfrom the right to preserve Classics as the keystone of Western culture exacerbate political divides while
ignoring the failure of the status quo.
We must fight for the study of ancient texts, ideas, and culture in a world that increasingly devalues thehumanistic study in general and the study of the past in particular. It is time for us to design our future.
Today scholars of all ancient cultures are isolated in their struggle to survive: I will argue in this talk how wewill be stronger together.

Joy Connolly began her service as President of the American Council of Learned Societies on July 1, 2019.
Previously, she served as provost and interim president of The Graduate Center at the City University of New
York, where she was also Distinguished Professor of Classics. She has held faculty appointments at New York
University, where she served as Dean for the Humanities from 2012-16, Stanford University, and theUniversity of Washington. Committed to broadening scholars’ impact on the world, as provost at theGraduate Center Joy secured generous support from the Mellon Foundation to foster public-facing
scholarship through innovative experiments in doctoral training. She has published two books with Princeton
University Press and over seventy articles, reviews, and short essays. Connolly earned a BA from Princeton
University in 1991 and a PhD in classical studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997. She was electeda fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021.
https://www.acls.org/joy-connolly/Carmen Codoñer Merino
Emerita Professor at the University of Salamanca

English abstract:Transitions. Text and context
Transitions between two historical periods are usually marked by important events. On other occasions,changes are perceived, but we do not have objective data to delimit or to frame a change which, despite
this, is perceptible. Philology, which focuses on the study of texts, inseparable from the context in which
they are generated, can help to recognize more clearly the historical changes.

Spanish abstract:
Humanismo : transiciones. Texto y contexto
Generalmente las transiciones entre dos épocas suelen estar marcadas por importantes acontecimientos. Enotras ocasiones, se perciben cambios, pero no contamos con datos objetivos que delimiten, que enmarquen
un cambio que, a pesar de ello, es perceptible. La filología, centrada en el estudio de los textos, inseparablesdel contexto en que se generan, puede contribuir a reconocer con más claridad los cambios históricos.

Carmen Codoñer is Professor Emerita at the University of Salamanca, Spain, where she has trained
numerous disciples, who today occupy important positions in various Spanish and Latin Americanuniversities. Her works cover a wide range from language to literature and from the Roman Republican
period to Renaissance Humanism. Her contributions to the medieval Latin lexicon are especially notable, as
well as to the study of the grammatical and linguistic works of the 15th and 16th centuries in Europe.
https://produccioncientifica.usal.es/investigadores/148078/detalle

Denis Rousset
Directeur d’études in Greek epigraphy at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE), Sorbonne, Paris
Member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres

Abstract
Comment publier les inscriptions grecques et latines au XXIe s.?
Le flot actuel de publications révèle une somme jamais atteinte de moyens humains et financiers dévolus àl’édition d’inscriptions antiques. Cependant, et à la différence de quelques disciplines sœurs comme lapapyrologie et la numismatique, cet accroissement de moyens ne paraît pas accompagné d’une unification
des outils et des corpus épigraphiques, mais au contraire par une dispersion, sous la forme de réalisations ou
projets émiettés, peu coordonnés, voire concurrents. Ne faut-il donc pas mener une réflexion sur les formes
et les voies de publication, individuelle et collective ? Ainsi, on s’interrogera entre autres d’une part surl’avenir des grands Corpora (IG et CIL), et leur indispensable continuation, pourvu qu’ils soient modernisés
dans leur forme éditoriale et leur mode de diffusion, et tant soit peu unifiés, pour ne plus constituer desinstruments séparés des bases de données en ligne, et d’autre part sur la pratique des projets courts, liée àleur financement – question qu’il faut d’autant plus poser qu’elle dépasse de loin le champ de l’Antiquité
classique.

Denis Rousset
Né en 1962, docteur et maître de conférences en 1991, habilité à diriger des recherches en 2001
2002- : Directeur d’études à l’École pratique des hautes études, Section des sciences historiques etphilologiques, Épigraphie grecque et géographie historique du monde helléniquePrix (= premier prix) de l’Association des études grecques (Paris), 2003.
Prix Ambatielos de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 2004.
Korrespondierendes Mitglied des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts (Berlin), 2004.
Member of the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), 2007-2008
Chevalier des Palmes Académiques, 2005 ; officier, 2018.
Prix Brunet de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 2011.
Correspondant de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (Institut de France), 2021.
Président de l’Association des études grecques 2020-2021.
Membre du comité d’évaluation scientifique 27 (« études du passé, patrimoines, cultures ») de l’Agencenationale de la recherche, 2021-2022.
Membre élu du Conseil d’administration (2022-2026) de l’École pratique des hautes étudesDoyen de la Section des Sciences historiques et philologiques de l’École pratique des hautes études (20232027)
Membre élu du Conseil d’administration (2020-2024) de l’Université Paris Sciences LettresVice-Président de l’Association internationale d’épigraphie grecque et latine (2017-2022 ; 2022-2027).
CV complet et liste des quelque 200 publications sur :https://www.ephe.psl.eu/denis-rousset

Stefan Rebenich
Professor of Ancient History and the Classical Reception at the University of Berne

Abstract"Alte Geschichte in Forschung und Lehre": A very brief survey of the development of Ancient History inGermany over the last fifty years
The lecture will give a brief overview of trends and developments in the study of the ancient world inGermany during the last half century. During this period, Ancient History continued defining its position
between the 'positivistic' study of sources on the one hand and (post-)structuralist models of interpretationon the other, and continually reviewed its mediating role between Classics and History. This critical review is
the basis for discussing some prospects for the future.

Stefan Rebenich is Professor of Ancient History and the Classical Tradition in the Department of History at
the University of Bern (Switzerland). He has published widely in the field of late antiquity and the history ofhistoriography, including Hieronymus und sein Kreis (1992), Jerome (2002), Theodor Mommsen. Eine
Biographie (2nd ed. 2007), and, most recently, Die Deutschen und ihre Antike. Eine wechselvolle
Beziehung (2021).
https://www.hist.unibe.ch/ueber_uns/personen/rebenich_stefan/index_ger.html