Seminar Series Trinity 2026

Pre-literary literature in ancient Italy?  
Liminal spaces between orality and the written word 

Week 2, May 6                                                                                       
Timothy Barnes (Oxford)
Concepta verba - linguistic aspects of oral tradition in ancient Italy

Week 3, May 13 
Daniele Federico Maras (Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Firenze) 
Making the intangibile tangibile: writing and painting as interfaces for oral cultural heritage in ancient Etruria

Week 4, May 20 
Ruth Whitehouse (UCL)                                                             
Places and spaces: the overlap of writing and oral performance in pre-Roman Italy

Week 5, May 27 
Alexandre Grandazzi (Sorbonne)                                                       
Sacra scriptio. De l'inscrit à l'écrit: quelques réflexions sur le passage d'un seuil

Week 6, June 3   
T. P. Wiseman (Exeter) 
Liminal spaces in the Greek Rome of the Tarquins 

Week 7, June 10 
Timothy Cornell (Manchester) 
The Romans and their past before historiography 

Week 8, June 17 
Ed Bispham (Oxford) 
Pre-Roman narrative ghosts: presences, absences, truncations