Online Open House | Uncanny Intruders: Ghosts and Greek Literature, with Robert Cioffi

Online Open House | Uncanny Intruders: Ghosts and Greek Literature, with Robert Cioffi

We are pleased to welcome Robert Cioffi of Bard College, for an Online Open House discussion entitled “Uncanny Intruders: Ghosts and Greek Literature.” The discussion will be live-streamed on the Center for Hellenic Studies YouTube channel on Friday, October 23 at 11 a.m. EDT, and will be recorded.

In preparation for this event, you might like to read this passages:

• The ghost of Patroklos at Iliad 23.65–108, available from the Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours Sourcebook
• The ghost of Clytemnestra at Aeschylus’ Eumenides 94-139, available from the Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours Sourcebook
• P.Oxy. 1368, a fragment of Lollianus’ Phoenicica, a fragmentary fictional text written in Greek probably in the second century CE; it is identified in its original edition (on page 119–120) as “Romance.”
• Lucian’s Lover of Lies especially sections 27, 30–31

Robert Cioffi is Assistant Professor of Classics at Bard College. His research interests and recent publications center on Greek prose fiction of the Roman imperial period and travel, ethnography, and identity in the ancient world. He is currently completing a monograph on the ethnographic discourse of the Greek novels, entitled Narrating the Marvelous: The Greek Novel and the Ancient Ethnographic Imagination. Recent publications include articles on epiphany in the Greek novels, the relationship between Greek and Roman novels, and travel in the Roman world. In addition to his scholarly publications, he is a contributor to the London Review of Books. He is also developing two new areas of research. The first is focused on the Renaissance reception of the Greek novels. The second is about the representation of ghosts and the supernatural in Greek literature.