The noise-lovers: cultures of speech and sound in second-century Rome

This chapter provides an examination of an ideal of the ‘deliberate speaker’, who aims to reflect time, thought, and study in his speech. In the Roman Empire, words became a vital tool for creating and defending in-groups, and orators and authors in both Latin and Greek alleged, by contrast, that their enemies produced babbling noise rather than articulate speech. In this chapter, the ideal of the deliberate speaker is explored through the works of two very different contemporaries: the African-born Roman orator Fronto and the Syrian Christian apologist Tatian. Despite moving in very different circles, Fronto and Tatian both express their identity and authority through an expertise in words, in strikingly similar ways. The chapter ends with a call for scholars of the Roman Empire to create categories of analysis that move across different cultural and linguistic groups. If we do not, we risk merely replicating the parochialism and insularity of our sources.Accepted manuscrip

The Roman past in the age of the Severans: Cassius Dio, Philostratus and Herodian.

The era of Septimius Severus and his successors (AD 193-235) began with civil war and saw the breakdown of the consensus-based Roman elite that had dominated the previous Antonine age. The Severan period also saw a revival of Greco-Roman historiography, seen in works that deal partly or wholly with contemporary events. This new historiography puts aside traditionalist precepts of the previous decades and incorporates new imaginative and analytic devices to describe the dramatic shift in perception of the Empire that the authors had experienced in their own lifetimes. The three Greek-language authors studied here all lived from the 170s into at least the 230s, and seem to have written in their old age. They are Cassius Dio, the author of a massive 80-book history of Rome from its foundation to his own day; Philostratus, who wrote biographies of intellectual and religious figures from Nero's time to Caracalla's; and Herodian, whose eight-book history covers the years 180 to 238. These three are close contemporaries, but have never been studied as the product of one generational experience. All three men wrote against a background of official Severan presentation of the Empire that stressed much that was different from the Antonines. In particular the Emperor was increasingly distancing himself from the elite in symbolic terms and emphasizing the dynastic and military sides of his persona. Dio responds with a vision of the Roman Empire that emphasizes the continuity of institutions, especially the Senate, as opposed to personalities: this is done especially in non-narrative episodes of his history. Philostratus' biographies make their subjects, especially Herodes Atticus and Apollonius of Tyana, and the Greek culture they represent, into the central element of the Roman world, with Emperors as important but peripheral. Each author uses narrative self-portraiture as a technique for identifying himself with what he sees as the defining feature of his Roman world. Herodian shares the others' sense of crisis, but sees the Empire as now utterly dysfunctional, and his narrative of recent history emphasizes a breakdown of standard ideas of cultural geography and of the customary function of rhetoric.Ph.D.Ancient historyClassical literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/126071/2/3224920.pd

Not What Meets the Eye: Re-examining reconstruction in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina

Thesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2012During the Bosnian War (1992-1995), one strategy of ethnic cleansing employed by all sides involved the destruction and obliteration of physical manifestations of ethnic identity including historic buildings, such as churches, cathedrals, mosques, and urban infrastructure. Postwar preservation projects across the country have employed reconstruction to resurrect lost historic buildings. The Stari Most reconstruction in Mostar embodies this type of intervention and also highlights the symbolism associated with it. For the most part, Western scholarship on the postwar preservation efforts focuses on the reconstructed object but does not analyze comprehensively the impact of this type of intervention on the local community. This thesis argues that Western scholarship on the archaeological reconstruction of historic structures in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) must consider new factors to achieve a more complex and realistic understanding of the impact of this type of intervention on the local community. Factors include the long-term impact of reconstruction funded by the International Community on the creation of a collective ethnic identity, the impact of people displaced or permanently resettle away from their pre-war home on the motivations for reconstruction, as well as the potential of digital heritage for postwar reconstruction projects. The thesis weights case studies and discusses them within larger theoretical constructs to explore these issues. In particular, it features in depth analysis of the Ferhadija Mosque reconstruction project in Banja Luka, BiH in relation to the three main issues. This thesis ultimately aims to demonstrate how more consideration of the engagement with both the act of reconstruction and the finished building will give preservationists more critical tools for assessing the use of the intervention

The fifteenth annual vegetation study of a transect in Cecil Bay, Michigan.

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/53716/1/2151.pdfDescription of 2151.pdf : Access restricted to on-site users at the U-M Biological Station