'Domesticating Death: Living in the House of Hades' presented by Karen Bassi, UC Santa Cruz
Department: Classics
Date and Time: December 3, 2015 | 4:00 PM-5:30 PMEvent Location: KH 400D
Event Details
This paper explores the equation of the house (domos) of the living with the house of the dead, i.e., the house of Hades, in a selection of ancient Greek texts and visual sources. What does this equation -- at the intersection of myth and social reality -- tell us about Greek eschatology as a response to the inevitability of death? The argument is framed by the notion of the "domestication of death" in recent social science literature.
Karen Bassi is professor of classics and literature at UC Santa Cruz. Her most recent book, Traces of the Past: Classics between History and Archaeology, is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press. She is currently the PI for a research Residency Group at the UCHRI on The History of Mortality: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. During the residency she is working on a book titled Imitating the Dead, an interdisciplinary study of facing death in Greek tragedy. Her paper is a work in progress from this project.