What's the Score with the Core?

CUSP/ASP Annual NSOP Lecture

Friday, August 31, 2018
9:00–11:00 a.m.
Skyline Ballroom, Faculty House

Gareth Williams will describe how the Core Curriculum contributes to your larger intellectual trajectory at Columbia; how it fits in with and strengthens the competencies that a Columbia education aims to foster; and what you can expect to find when you enter the classroom in such courses as Literature Humanities, Contemporary Civilization and the other Core offerings. A period of question and answer will follow the talk.

Biography

Gareth Williams has taught at Columbia since 1992. He received a Ph.D. in 1990 from Cambridge University for a dissertation on Ovid’s exilic writings that subsequently resulted in two books: the first, Banished Voices: Readings in Ovid’s Exile Poetry (Cambridge, 1994), and the second, The Curse of Exile: A Study of Ovid’s Ibis, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society Supplementary Volume 19 (Cambridge, 1996). Two distinct research phases followed, the first of which focused on the Latin ethical writings of Lucius Annaeus Seneca. Two monographs resulted, the first an edition with commentary of L. Annaeus Seneca: Selected Moral Dialogues. De Otio, De Brevitate Vitae (Cambridge, 2003); the second, The Cosmic Viewpoint: A Study of Seneca’s Natural Questions (Oxford, 2012), was awarded the Goodwin Award of Merit by the Society for Classical Studies in 2014. Most recently, among various other projects and edited volumes in the area of Roman philosophy, his research has focused on the socio-literary culture of Renaissance Venice, an interest that recently resulted in the publication of Pietro Bembo on Etna: The Ascent of a Venetian Humanist (Oxford, 2017).