By Anne Parayil
This spring, UC Santa Barbara is launching the Center for the Study of Ancient Fiction – the first of its kind in North America.
Helen Morales, UCSB Classics professor and co-director of the new Center for the Study of Ancient Fiction.
Its goal is to foster collaborative research and interdisciplinary connections about prose fiction that dates from the earliest written literature to the modern era. Until now, the major initiatives in the field have been in Europe.
Daphnis and Chloe is an ancient Greek novel written in the Roman Empire about a boy and a girl who are abandoned at birth and later become lovers.
“This is the only – or this is the first – center for ancient fiction, to my knowledge in North America,” said UCSB Classics professor Helen Morales. “What we want to do is to promote work in that area.” Morales and Emilio Capettini, also of the Classics department, are the first co-directors.
The new project was started by UCSB faculty in a diverse group of departments, including English, Spanish and Portuguese, and Religious Studies, in addition to Classics.
Emilio Capettini, UCSB Classics professor and co-director of the new Center for the Study of Ancient Fiction.
The idea to open a new center stemmed from a realization that UCSB has a concentration of scholars with expertise in ancient fiction. “We have a cluster of excellence here," Morales said. “We wanted to create a hub for interdisciplinary work.”
The center’s first initiative was sponsoring a graduate seminar this past winter by visiting professor Stephen Trzaskoma, of the University of New Hampshire, who talked about his latest research on Ancient Greek novels.
The study of ancient fiction spans the historical, cultural, and linguistic development of ancient novels or fiction texts and how they have been received throughout the ages. Two examples would be Daphnis and Chloe by Longus and Satyricon by Petronius.
“Our hope is that dialogue across departments will give us a better sense of what ancient fiction was, and how it worked,” Morales said. As the center develops, she hopes it will engage scholars from even more disciplines.
On the international level, the Novel Saints Project in Ghent, Belgium looks at the intersections between ancient fiction and hagiography, and KYKNOS is a network in the UK, based in Swansea, Wales, that studies Ancient Greek and Roman novels.
The UCSB center plans lectures, workshops, and guest speakers and to provide resources for students and faculty here and abroad. “[It] will allow UCSB faculty and students to interact not only among themselves but also with some of the national and international scholars who have made, and are making, significant contributions to the study of ancient fiction,” said Center co-director Emilio Capettini.
The UCSB center has already invited scholars from Ghent University in Belgium, from Athens Greece, and from Notre Dame University and Johns Hopkins University in the United States, to participate in an upcoming colloquium to share their research via Zoom.
“We hope not only to advance the study of ancient fictional texts but also to promote a cross-pollination of methods and interpretive strategies between researchers across disciplinary and geographical boundaries,” Capettini said.
The center’s advisory committee comes from three different UCSB departments and includes Heather Blurton from the English Department, Dwight Reynolds from the Religious Studies Department, and Antonio Cortijo from the Spanish and Portuguese Department.
If students or faculty are interested in getting involved with the center, they should contact professor Helen Morales at hlmora@ucsb.edu.
Anne Parayil is a third-year UC Santa Barbara student majoring in Communication. She wrote this article for her Writing Program class, Journalism for Web and Social Media.