Reading Homer as an anthropologist

What happens when you stop thinking of the Iliad as a work of fiction but instead see it as a primary text to help explain an ancient society?
That’s what archaeologist Tara Carter does in lecture 21 and lecture 22 of her great UC San Diego course Prehistory and the Birth of Civilization (feed).
She presents the [...]

Archaeologist Isabelle Pafford teaches new course

University of Santa Clara archaeologist Isabelle Pafford is back with a new course about heroic narratives, Heroes & Heroism (iTunes). The course covers heroic figures in ancient works like the Iliad, the Gilgamesh epic, and the Bhagavad Gita, and explores the historical background behind these tales.
Pafford has many fans among my readers who have praised [...]

Book tour sightings

Recent book tour sightings on the net:
Jewish Book Week 2009
The 2009 Jewish book week is now online (website, iTunes), with lots of book news and conversations with literati and assorted pundits. Some good bets:

American Fervour (website) Columbia University historian Simon Schama talks about the role of religion in US history.
Rhyming Life and Death (website) You [...]

A new Shakespeare portrait?

In case you missed all the recent hoopla about the possibility that a painting of an unknown 17th century nobleman could be a likeness of William Shakespeare, check out Shakespeare Found (iTunes), an interview with Professor Stanley Wells, Chairman of The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.
Wells explains why he believes that this portrait, owned by the Cobbe [...]

Dreaming of the Apocalypse

Have you heard the news that the world will end in the year 2011? It’s one more example, says UC Berkeley Professor Ronald Hendel, of apocalyptic thinking: a mode of biblical interpretation that began sometime around the third century BCE and continues today.
Week 3 of Hendel’s course The Bible in Western Culture (feed) explores apocalyptic [...]

The Bible Through Literary Eyes

When we are accustomed to a literary genre, such as the Western, we have certain expectations. We expect that a manly hero, who is good with a gun, will defeat some dastardly foe. A writer of the Western can then play with these expectations for dramatic or comic effects.
But what about the Bible? Does [...]

Western Movies: Myth, Ideology, and Genre

The myth of the American frontier and what it meant to Americans in the twentieth century is the subject of Wesleyan University Professor Richard Slotkin’s course Western Movies: Myth, Ideology, and Genre (iTunes).
Slotkin, a well known author and culture critic, gave this course in early 2008 just before his retirement. Check it out — this [...]

Enlightenment, Romanticism, Revolution/1660-1848

Undergraduates in UC San Diego’s Revelle College take a 5-course sequence called Humanities (website), which covers the greatest literary, artistic and philophical hits in Western Civ, from the ancient Greeks to the modern day.
This quarter web diy scholars can listen in on the podcast of Humanities 4: Enlightenment, Romanticism, Revolution/1660-1848 (website, feed) taught by Eric [...]

Missouri State posts course collection on iTunesU

Missouri State University recently joined the small group of colleges and universities that have posted complete free courses on Apple’s iTunesU. (See my Guide to iTunesU for other iTunesU courses).
The Missouri State collection (iTunes) includes 17 full courses available as video downloads. Subjects include history, literature, science and music.
I have already sampled a few of [...]

John Milton: Happy 400th birthday

This week marked the 400th anniversary of the birth of John Milton, the great English poet who penned the epic Paradise Lost and turned out dozens of radical political books and pamphlets in support of Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan revolution.
In commemoration of the occasion, Christ’s College of Cambridge University, Milton’s alma mater, produced the academic version [...]