In Process

February 20 | Anna Conser with Patrick Burns | "Accent Patterns in Tragic Lyric: A Computational Study”

"Accent Patterns in Tragic Lyric: A Computational Study”
draft chapter from an in-progress monograph

The choral odes of ancient Greek tragedies were originally created as song-and-dance numbers, combining words, music and dance in what ancient critics considered a single medium: choreia. The music for tragic odes was not written down, but my research suggests that the lyric texts themselves preserve hidden information about their melodic settings. Several studies have investigated how linguistic pitch accents are rendered melodically in the ancient songs that survive with music notation, identifying several widespread principles by which composers coordinated the intonation of the lyrics with the sung melody. As part of my on-going research into tragic music, I have created software that can apply these principles to texts preserved without music notation. My work-in-progress is the second chapter of a monograph addressing what this new data can tell us about the musical design of Greek tragedy. In this chapter, I present the results of a computational study of pitch accent patterns in the lyrics of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. My preliminary results provide new evidence for the development of early Greek music, and expose several specific patterns relevant to the literary interpretation of Greek tragedy’s lyric texts.

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Anna Conser is a philologist specializing in Greek literature. Her current research focusses on ancient music and performance, Greek drama and lyric poetry, and the digital processing of ancient texts. As part of her first book project, she has developed software tools to analyze the melodic patterning of pitch accents in Greek choral lyric. This new melodic evidence for Greek choral odes allows her to interpret ancient tragedy using approaches borrowed from opera and musical theater. Dr. Conser’s work on performance is informed by extensive experience as a director, composer, and choreographer for modern productions of ancient plays

Patrick J. Burns is Associate Research Scholar, Digital Projects at NYU's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World working in ancient-world data processing and historical language text mining and analysis. Patrick earned his doctorate in Classics from Fordham University in 2016 and has since been active in the area of computational philology. Patrick is the maintainer of the LatinCy, pretrained natural language processing pipelines for Latin, a co-author/developer for LatinBERT, and has been a contributor to the Classical Language Toolkit. Recent publications include "(Re)Active Latin: Computational Chat as Future Colloquia" for the New England Classical Journal looks at the pedagogical implications of using large language models and chatbots in the Latin classroom as well as a blog post "How Much Latin Does ChatGPT "Know"?" exploring the Latin-language training data of OpenAI's popular AI. This year he co-taught a graduate seminar at ISAW on uses of generative artificial intelligence in humanities research.

March 13 | Siham Bouamer with Denis M. Provencher, North Carolina State

April 3 | Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara with Margaret Chowning, Berkeley | "Apocalypse Now: Maya Marianism, Female Prophecy, and Rebellion"

Apocalypse Now: Maya Marianism, Female Prophecy, and Rebellion

In the summer of 1712, María López, a teenage Maya girl in the Chiapas highlands, proclaimed to have spoken with an apparition of the Virgin Mary who told her that Spanish colonialism would soon end. By early August, thousands of Maya “soldiers of the Virgin,” rose up in the Tzeltal Revolt, one of the largest and most radical Indigenous revolts in Spanish America before 1750. Throughout the rebellion, María López continued to relay the Virgin’s directives, dressed in priestly vestments, and presided alongside newly ordained Maya Catholic priests. Lopez could neither read nor write, but I argue she acted as an Indigenous intellectual, navigating gender restrictions and establishing her prophetic authority through a keen awareness of the sociopolitical context of Chiapas’ Maya highlands and creative intellectual engagement with European and Maya Christian prophetic traditions.

Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara is a 2024–25 Taft Center Fellow. She teaches Latin American History, specializing in the colonial period and nineteenth century. Her research focuses on gender and religion in colonial and nineteenth-century Central America. Her book, Alone at the Altar: Single Women and Devotion in Guatemala, 1670-1870 (Stanford University Press, 2018), considers how non-elite single women forged complex alliances with the Catholic Church in Guatemala's colonial capital, and how those alliances significantly shaped local religion and the spiritual economy, late colonial reform efforts, and post-Independence politics. Her new book project, The Virgin's Wrath, examines gender relations, Mayan Catholicism, and violence in eighteenth-century Chiapas. She teaches survey courses on colonial Latin America as well as upper division courses on topics such as gender, religion, the Spanish Inquisition, and Afro-Latin America.

Margaret Chowning is the Muriel McKevitt Sonne Chair Professor of Latin American History (emerita) at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Wealth and Power in Provincial Mexico from the Late Colony to the Revolution (Stanford, 1999), Rebellious Nuns: The Troubled History of a Mexican Convent (Oxford, 2006), and Catholic Women and Mexican Politics, 1750-1940 (Princeton, 2023). She is working on a book of urban history in Mexico, with special attention to the impact that liberal policies and liberal “values” exerted on urban life in the nineteenth century.

April 10 | Amy Lind with Macarena Gomez-Barris, Brown

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