For the winter term 2026, please, expect:
a guest lecture by Dr. Kathryn Mattison, McMaster University
a guest lecture by Dr. Judy Fletcher, Wilfried Laurier University
Work-in-progress presentations by our Graduate Students
A Homer Appreciation Day
Stay tuned for more information.
There will be a ti anthropos on Wednesday the 29th of October from 5:30-7:30pm hosted by Dr. Kroeker entitled The Popular Reception of Ancient Stoicism.
This event will be held in HH 2034 or what is known as the project cube, and all are welcome to attend. We look forward to seeing you there! Please find a description of the topic below.
The Department of Classical Studies is proud to present a lecture by Mr. Dan Hutter on October 24 from 6:15-7:15. The title of the lecture is, The Varangian Guard: The New Praetorians of the Eastern Roman Empire. The lecture is free and all are welcome. It is being held in AL 105 and following the lecture is our Annual Wine and Cheese event.
Please join us on October 6 for a Workshop at the University of Waterloo. DRAGEN Lab, St Jerome's University.
While women tended to play only marginal roles in ancient military and political matters, they not rarely figure as important characters in historical, legendary or mythical accounts of exploration, settlement, or early urban development. In these they often appear as largely artificial and symbolic characters, but this should not prevent us from digging deeper and asking ourselves about the effective historical roles that women played either at the time of foundation or much later when an origin was remembered – or rather construed – to explain, justify, or change interethnic relations. Examples discussed at this workshop will range from the Amazons over Medeia and Kirke to Dido and Lavinia, but they also include the Biblical Sheerah (1 Chronicles 7:20-29) and the romanticized Gallic ‘princess’ Gyptis/Petta, the daughter of the Segobrigian king Nannos. In certain ways, these ladies shaped the legends of early-modern Matoaka/Pocachontas and Malinche, and never ceased to invite new interpretation and instrumentalization, as an example from National Socialist Germany will illustrate.
At this workshop, we shall collect, compare, and analyse diverse stories featuring such women and aim for developing a typology. The better we understand these female roles in the various literary traditions, the better we may understand these traditions of origin and identity as well as the agency ascribed to or claimed by women in different times and places of the ancient world. Their roles but also the foundation stories in which they acted were always subject to sociopolitical change at the local level and to major ideological shifts inducing the redefinition of ethnic identity and alterity on a much broader scale. The ultimate aim of this workshop, and of the international and interdisciplinary collaboration that it forms part of, is to help us better understand the inclusive and exclusive dynamics of storytelling and identity construction in societies of the past and the world we live in.
For the full program including paper abstracts, see https://www.altaycoskun.com/female-roles-2025. Attendance is open to everyone and free, but registration is required. Please, contact Altay Coskun at uwaterloo dot ca for registration.
Please join us on September 30th at 3pm, the DRAGEN Lab welcomes colleagues to the St. Jerome’s Library, Room 2011, for a talk by DRAGEN Lab Alumni, Hannah Gardiner, titled, “The Blessed Virgins". For more information go to https://www.dragenlab.ca/news/the-blessed-virgins-hannah-gardiner-lecture.
Welcome faculty and students to the 2025-26 school year! We want to invite you all to this year’s Meet the Profs, which will take place in the Grad House on Wednesday 24th September on the second floor. We hope to see you come out and get to know your peers and professors.
We can't wait to see you all then!
Your consuls Aleksandra and Tiara
C.A.M.E.L.O.T. is a medieval and experimental archaeology conference happening on Sunday 21 September 2025 at St. Jerome's University at the University of Waterloo. For more information please see - https://www.dragenlab.ca/camelot-conference. All are welcome.
The DRAGEN Lab at St. Jerome’s University is pleased to welcome you all to our conference room in SJ1 at 12pm on Friday, September 19th for a talk by Environments of Change project collaborator Dr. Stephen Sherlock titled, “What I did on my holidays: An Early Bronze Age Ring Ditch at Streethouse, Yorkshire, England”. Dr. Sherlock’s presentation will discuss the details and findings of research done this past July and August at our field site in North Yorkshire, UK.
Dr. Sherlock, as well as various graduate student researchers from the DRAGEN Lab, will discuss their findings, involvement, and curiosities from an exciting summer spent unearthing thousands of years of pre-history.
We invite each of you to attend this event, and to please spread the word.
When: Friday, September 19th @ 12PM
Where: DRAGEN Lab, SJ1
You are cordially invited to attend the inaugural SJU RESEARCH SALON, an opportunity to connect with SJU scholars and to learn more about the research we produce as a university community.
To launch our new Research Salon, Kieran Bonner has kindly offered to present his current project, “The Lived Experiences of Euphoria in Drinking: Thinking and Thoughtfulness.”
As Kieran notes, “Euphoria” comes from the ancient Greek, and it means “to bear well.” It has now entered everyday usage to refer to the feeling of well-being or elation. There is the collective euphoria expressed by a population when the local team wins, when a dictator is overthrown, the euphoria associated with falling in love, as well as the euphoria experienced in a drink or drug-induced elation. Euphoria is pervasive, a pervasiveness often accompanied by its opposite. At the inaugural Research Salon, Kieran explores the lived experiences of euphoria in relation to drinking, thinking, and thoughtlessness. While these experiences are ineffable, they also point to the relation between desire and judgment (wisdom) and its relation to human flourishing. Disparate topics – like William James on the relation between the mystic consciousness and the drunken consciousness; Gadamer on health, illness, and well-being; and Arendt’s reflections both on a selection of classical Greek thinkers regarding their experience of thinking and on Eichmann and his thoughtlessness – are shown to be interconnected with and through the experience of elation or euphoria. The narrative analysis and journey through the apparently disparate texts and experiences is itself a demonstration of the dialectical method of reflexive analysis in sociology.
This first SJU Research Salon takes place in the DRAGEN Lab, on the second floor of SJ1, adjacent to the Library. Registration is not required, and all staff, faculty, and interested students are welcome!
In support of the intellectual process, attendees will be offered fine food and drink. All are encouraged to indulge in the newly-acquired Chocolate Research Fountain.
Where: Dragen Lab 2nd floor SJU
Join us for Culture Fest 2025! -- a celebration of outstanding work by undergraduate students from some of the Faculty of Arts' culture-focused programs. Students will give three-minute presentations on historical and contemporary topics followed by an informal reception. Thursday, March 6, 3 p.m. to 5 p.m., Conrad Grebel University College - Room 2202 (across from main reception)
Event organizers: Bojana Videkanić (Visual Culture) and Jeremy Bergen (Religious Studies)