Sapphic TALES: Re-Making Sappho Through Comparative Media

As Citizen TALES Commons, we are proud of Dr. Vassiliki Rapti's seminar at the MIT-WGS program in this academic term and looking forward to know her inspiring contributions to this program...Please stay tuned!

For more info on this seminar:

Sapphic TALES: Re-Making Sappho Through Comparative Media Led by Vasiliki Rapti, Harvard University

Wednesdays 6:00-8:00PM; October 9 - Nov 6, 2019

“Sapphic TALES” aims to become a lab of radical thinking and cross-pollination revolving around gender and female sexual fluidity apropos of Sappho.

Participants will have the opportunity to engage in conversation with leading experts on Sappho and to “translate” her fragments into their own favorite medium and theoretical framework that will be displayed in a collective exhibition with the final “projects-translations.” Participants will think and walk alongside Sappho of Lesbos, the great female lyric poet of Antiquity. Whether seen as a feminist heroine, a queer role model, or as the first innovative female voice who stood up for herself and created the first school for young women, she has become a “field” in its own. This course will address these issues and the controversy surrounding her life and work through a close analysis of her fragments and their variegated reception over the centuries in various media. It will draw on the scholarship of noted Sappho scholars such as Claude Calame, Anne Carson, and Judith Butler and challenge participants to “translate” Sappho’s legacy into their own theoretical frame and medium.

What you need to know about GCWS microseminars: The GCWS micro-seminars are free five-week, un-graded reading, writing, and discussion-based graduate seminars organized around specific themes, speaker series, film screenings, new book publications, or other points of focus. These seminars, led by GCWS member institution faculty, explore feminist, queer, or other gender and sexuality related lines of inquiry. Specifically, they provide students and instructors the opportunity to delve deeply into ideas not encountered in existing courses at their home institutions.

Seminars are open to member institution graduate students, seniors in WGS or a related major, and to faculty.

Priority enrollment will be given to graduate students.

Enrollment and assessment: Participating students will receive a certificate of completion from the GCWS, stamped with the MIT seal. No credit is associated with participation in these seminars. These micro-seminars focus on participation in the absence of formal assessment and provide opportunities to explore subject areas in an in-depth, concentrated manner.

Eligibility: Graduate students enrolled in any department and degree program at GCWS member institutions may apply. Undergraduate seniors doing work in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies or related major are eligible and encouraged to apply. University staff and faculty may also join, space-permitting.

How to apply: Students can apply through the GCWS microseminar page.

Best regards,

Stacey Stacey Lantz

Program Manager

Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality (GCWS)

Pronouns: she, her, hers

(617) 324-2085

Building 14N Room 211,

MIT 77 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02139