Creating Roman Identity: Subjectivity and Self-Fashioning in Latin Literature the 1995 Berkeley Conference

Abstract

1HE FOLLOWING THREE ARTICLES by Maurizio Bettini, Martin Bloomer and Katharine Toll originated as talks at a conference held at Berkeley in September, 1995. This conference, entitled Creating Roman Identity: Subjectivity and Self Fashioning in Latin Literature, was hosted by the Classics Department as part of an annual series of talks and colloquia traditionally organized and run by Classics graduate students and funded by the Department's Heller fund. A memorable previous Heller event was a Homer colloquium in Spring 1994 which featured, among others, Gregory Nagy, Seth Schein, and Gregory Thalmann. For the 1995 Heller conference students wanted to gather Latinists with an interest in modern approaches to literature. As organizer I drew up a list of speakers in response to suggestions by graduate students. Those invited and speaking were Shadi Bartsch (University of California, Berkeley), Maurizio Bettini (University of Siena), Martin Bloomer (Stanford University), Tom Habinek (University of Southern California), John Henderson (Cambridge University), Stephen Hinds (University of Washington), Alessandro Schiesaro (Princeton University) and Kate Toll (University of California, Santa Cruz). The topic of identity, subjectivity and self-fashioning suggested itself to me as a convenient framework that allowed speakers to explore topics of their own choosing while at the same time providing them with a common focus.