Jennifer Devereaux | Harvard University (original) (raw)

Books by Jennifer Devereaux

by Jennifer Devereaux, William M Short, Peter Meineck, Alexander Forte, Laura Candiotto, Maria Gerolemou, Jacob L. Mackey, Jessica M Romney, Sarah Olsen, Anna Bonifazi, Elizabeth Minchin, Alessandro Vatri, Anne-Sophie J Noel, and Antonis Tsakmakis

The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Cognitive Theory is an interdisciplinary volume that exami... more The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Cognitive Theory is an interdisciplinary volume that examines the application of cognitive theory to the study of the classical world, across several interrelated areas including linguistics, literary theory, social practices, performance, artificial intelligence and archaeology. With contributions from a diverse group of international scholars working in this exciting new area, the volume explores the processes of the mind drawing from research in psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology, and interrogates the implications of these new approaches for the study of the ancient world.

Topics covered in this wide-ranging collection include: cognitive linguistics applied to Homeric and early Greek texts, Roman cultural semantics, linguistic embodiment in Latin literature, group identities in Greek lyric, cognitive dissonance in historiography, kinesthetic empathy in Sappho, artificial intelligence in Hesiod and Greek drama, the enactivism of Roman statues and memory and art in the Roman Empire.

This ground-breaking work is the first to organize the field, allowing both scholars and students access to the methodologies, bibliographies and techniques of the cognitive sciences and how they have been applied to classics.

Book Chapters by Jennifer Devereaux

Memory and Emotions in Antiquity , 2024

"Persuasion has long been one of the major fields of interest for researchers across a wide range... more "Persuasion has long been one of the major fields of interest for researchers across a wide range of disciplines. The present volume aims to establish a framework to enhance the understanding of the features, manifestations and purposes of persuasion across all Greek and Roman genres and in various institutional contexts. The volume considers the impact of persuasion techniques upon the audience, and how precisely they help speakers/authors achieve their goals. It also explores the convergences and divergences in deploying persuasion strategies in different genres, such as historiography and oratory, and in a variety of topics. This discussion contributes towards a more complete understanding of persuasion that will help to advance knowledge of decision-making processes in varied institutional contexts in antiquity."

While the field of classics has informed and influenced the early developments of the field of ps... more While the field of classics has informed and influenced the early developments of the field of psychology, these two disciplines presently enjoy fewer fruitful cross-fertilizations than one would expect. This book shows how the study of classics can help psychologists anchor their scientific findings in a historical, literary and philosophical framework, while insights of contemporary psychology offer new hermeneutic methods and explanations to classicists. This book is the first to date to offer a wide-ranging overview of the possibilities of marrying contemporary trends in psychology and classical studies. Advocating a critical dialogue between both disciplines, it offers novel reflections on psychotherapy, ancient philosophy, social psychology, literature and its theory, historiography, psychoanalysis, tragedy, the philosophy of mind, linguistics and reception. With twenty contributions by specialists in different fields, it promotes the combination of classical and psychological perspectives, and demonstrates the methods and rewards of such an endeavour through concrete case studies.

Embodiment in Latin Semantics introduces theories of embodied meaning developed in the cognitive ... more Embodiment in Latin Semantics introduces theories of embodied meaning developed in the cognitive sciences to the study of Latin semantics. Bringing together contributions from an international group of scholars, the volume demonstrates the pervasive role that embodied cognitive structures and processes play in conventional Latin expression across levels of lexical, syntactic, and textual meaning construction. It shows not only the extent to which universal aspects of human embodiment are reflected in Latin's semantics, but also the ways in which Latin speakers capitalize on embodied understanding to express imaginative and culture-specific forms of meaning. In this way, the volume makes good on the potential of the embodiment hypothesis to enrich our understanding of meaning making in the Latin language, from the level of word sense to that of literary thematics. It should interest anyone concerned with how people, including in historical societies, create meaning through language.

Talks by Jennifer Devereaux

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping the landscape of education and research, challe... more Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping the landscape of education and research, challenging long-held ideas about what it means to be human. This talk will begin by exploring the cognitive, cultural, and biological reasons humans are drawn to creating and interacting with artificial agents—why we strive to replicate and enhance our own capabilities. Building on this, I will discuss how AI can be leveraged to enrich learning environments, opening new pathways to engage with complex ideas, foster critical thinking, and advance interdisciplinary approaches. I will then turn to a critical challenge: as AI becomes increasingly embedded in both research and education, it is not only transforming how we learn but also altering the very nature of the research that informs what we teach. I will invite the audience to reflect on the ethical implications of allowing artificial systems to reshape cognition and intelligence, and how this shift is redefining the fundamental study of human nature.

Although it has been suggested that 'an other-regarding sensibility of guilt' played a role in th... more Although it has been suggested that 'an other-regarding sensibility of guilt' played a role in the emotional life of ancient Romans (Konstan, 2010), there is no single term that points to a recognizable and well defined mental state that we might call 'guilt' in classical Latin. This paper explores why that is the case, by looking at the relationship between cultural and linguistic practices. Focusing, due to time constraints, on only two distinct domains-Stoic philosophy and Plautine theatre-the paper situates integer, a uniquely essential quality of character (Kaster, 2005), in respect to ancient Mediterranean notions of distributed cognition (Anderson, Cairns & Sprevak, 2019), while focusing on metonymies related to medical and scientific understandings of the body. The aim is to explain how these metonymies illuminate the role an other-regarding sensibility of guilt played in shaping notions of personhood in Roman society. The paper and the larger project of which it is a part are works in progress.

Bryn Mawr Classics Colloquium

Book Reviews by Jennifer Devereaux

Classical Review, 2022

COGNITION AND THE FUTURE - (M.L.) Popkin, (D.Y.) Ng (edd.) Future Thinking in Roman Culture. New ... more COGNITION AND THE FUTURE - (M.L.) Popkin, (D.Y.) Ng (edd.) Future Thinking in Roman Culture. New Approaches to History, Memory, and Cognition. Pp. xii + 193, ills. London and New York: Routledge, 2022.

Journal of Hellenic Studies, 2021

Link now available: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0075426920000427

Review of Anderson, M., Cairns, D., and Sprevak, M. (eds.), 2019. Distributed Cognition in Classical Antiquity. University of Edinburgh Press., 2021

Conference Presentations by Jennifer Devereaux

Linguistic Experientiality and Affectivity in Roman Texts

The urgency of scholarly analysis of trust, conspiracism, and the relationship between academy an... more The urgency of scholarly analysis of trust, conspiracism, and the relationship between academy and state during the COVID-19 pandemic presents academics with an opportune moment in which to probe evolving and emergent considerations of the functions of criticism. Since Bruno Latour archly observed that critique has ‘run out of steam’, debate within the critical discussions that postcritique thinker Rita Felski has termed the ‘method wars’ have been sometimes fractious. This conference seeks to return, in a generous spirit of collaboration, to imperative questions regarding the humanities’ functions, methods, and contribution both within and beyond the academy.

Postcritique writing has productively reinvigorated assessments of the type of activity the humanities perform. But this growing body of work has also exposed the need for a widespread re-evaluation that both includes and ranges beyond affective philosophies of attachment and strategies of surface reading. Amongst recent interrogations of critical practices, posited solutions have ranged across actor-network theory, ordinary language philosophy, attention to cognitive approaches to texts, new modes of interdisciplinarity, sociological, digital, and quantitative methods, and a reconsideration of the public functions of academic research. There is a critical momentum building behind the question of what kind of activity ‘criticism’ is, and how best to describe and understand the activities of the humanities more broadly. Attending to this question requires both innovation and a rigorous interrogation of the disparities, synchronies, and intersections of critique and postcritique. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick delicately articulated, a hermeneutics of suspicion can be ‘one kind of cognitive/affective theoretical practice among other, alternative kinds’. Is it possible that these various methods might offer each other mutual support, or coexist in a disciplinary structure that thrives upon critical variety? This conference seeks to explore the question: What are the assorted functions of our criticism?

SPSP Historical Psychology Preconference, 2023

Psychologists, biologists, and cognitive scientists argue that the body is part of the mind and t... more Psychologists, biologists, and cognitive scientists argue that the body is part of the mind and there is a piece of the body in every concept we make. With this claim and its linguistic implications in view, this paper demonstrates a 4E-derived method for identifying cognitive artifacts related to affective and emotional experience in the peculiar context of the ancient Mediterranean.

In Book VI of the Republic, which recounts a discussion fictionally set around 410 BC, Socrates a... more In Book VI of the Republic, which recounts a discussion fictionally set around 410 BC, Socrates accuses the public places where young people gather of perverting them, and this “when the multitude are seated together in assemblies or in court-rooms or theaters or camps
or any other public gathering of a crowd, and with loud uproar censure some of the things that are said and done and approve others, both in excess, with full-throated clamor and clapping of hands, and thereto the rocks and the region round about re-echoing redouble the din of the
censure and the praise.” (Rep., VI, 492b-c, transl. J. Adams, 1969). A relationship of continuity, if not identity, is thus established between the theatre and other places of public gathering, and the “spectators” seem to behave in a comparable manner. This workshop proposes to focus on these multiple spectatorial practices in 5th-century Athens, in order to
better grasp the ways in which they accumulated, juxtaposed or compartmentalized various experiences acquired in multiple performance venues, in the broadest sense of the term.

In fact, theatergoers belonged to a variety of socio-cultural groups and subgroups (Roselli 2011; Robson 2016) and were confronted, in their public or private lives, with a variety of spectatorial practices and situations. As men (or women?), citizens and non-citizens, they importer their prior experience of performances into the theater. For example, free Athenian citizens – but perhaps also women (Budelmann & Power 2015) – possessed a common education and choral culture (Revermann 2006), and thus attended performances not as neophytes but as “insiders.” Athenian citizens, one might assume, also mobilized their political baggage as participants in the public life of their city. The characters of Aristophanes explicitly address the bouleutes, but the poet did not forget either the presence in the public of foreigners. Theater spectators were also actors and audience at the “judicial spectacle” given in the courts of the city (Villacèque 2013). They were also officiants or participants in religious rituals and festivals taking place in a public or private setting. They were fathers, brothers, uncles, sons, (and in the case of women, mothers and daughters), and received the spectacle as members of an oikos whose functions and affects were also socially determined.
Finally, it is assumed that they could also interpret the performance in light of their knowledge and practice of other art forms, especially visual arts (Hedreen 2007). In the theatre, poets can thus assign multiple “identities” or “roles” to spectators – two notions to be questioned – but we must also think about the ways in which the roles of “theater spectators”
could be summoned in other contexts than that of theatrical performance.

This symposium aims to reflect on these questions in a fresh way. It will take the form of a workshop with time slots planned for collective reflection on texts and methods, aiming
to bring out new critical strategies.

Organized by Luca Graverini, Jeff Ulrich, and Carlo Caruso

Memory and Emotions in Antiquity , 2024

Bryn Mawr Classics Colloquium

Classical Review, 2022

Journal of Hellenic Studies, 2021

Link now available: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0075426920000427

Review of Anderson, M., Cairns, D., and Sprevak, M. (eds.), 2019. Distributed Cognition in Classical Antiquity. University of Edinburgh Press., 2021

Linguistic Experientiality and Affectivity in Roman Texts

SPSP Historical Psychology Preconference, 2023

Organized by Luca Graverini, Jeff Ulrich, and Carlo Caruso

by Jennifer Devereaux, Andreas Serafim, Sophia Papaioannou, Kyriakos Demetriou, Andreas Hetzel, Maria Kythreotou, Georgios Vassiliades, Judith Mossman, kostas apostolakis, Flaminia Beneventano della Corte, Sophia Xenophontos, Roger Brock, T. Davina McClain, and Andreas N . Michalopoulos

Organising Department: -- Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Cyprus C... more Organising Department:
-- Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Cyprus

Co-sponsors:
-- Department of Classics, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
-- Department of Classics and Philosophy, University of Cyprus

Conveners:
-- Kyriakos Demetriou (Cyprus)
-- Sophia Papaioannou (Athens)
-- Andreas Serafim (Cyprus/ OU Cyprus/ Trinity College Dublin)

Keynote speaker:
-- Michael Gagarin (Austin)

Confirmed speakers:
-- Adele Scafuro (Brown)
-- Alessandro Vatri (Oxford)
-- Andreas Hetzel (Hildesheim)
-- Andreas Michalopoulos (Athens)
-- Antonis Petrides (OU Cyprus)
-- Antonis Tsakmakis (Cyprus)
-- Benoit Sans (Brussels)
-- Brenda Griffith-Williams (UCL)
-- Christopher Carey (UCL)
-- Costas Apostolakis (Crete)
-- Dimos Spatharas (Crete)
-- Eleni Volonaki (Peloponnese)
-- Flaminia Beneventano della Corte (Siena)
-- Francesca Scrofani (EHESS/Università degli Studi di Trento)
-- Gabriel Danzig (Bar Ilan University)
-- Georgios Vassiliades (Paris IV-Sorbonne)
-- Jakob Wisse (Newcastle)
-- Jennifer Devereaux (Southern California)
-- Jessica Evans (Middlebury)
-- Jon Hesk (St Andrews)
-- Judith Mossman (Nottingham)
-- Kathryn Tempest (Roehampton)
-- Margot Neger (Salzburg)
-- Maria Kythreotou (Cyprus)
-- Michael Paschalis (Crete)
-- Rebecca van Hove (KCL)
-- Ricardo Gancz (Bar Ilan University)
-- Robert Sing (Cambridge)
-- Roger Brock (Leeds)
-- Sophia Xenophontos (Glasgow)
-- Stephen Todd (Manchester)
-- T. Davina McClain (Northwestern State University)
-- Tazuko Angela van Berkel (Leiden)
-- Thierry Hirsh (Oxford)
-- Tzu-I Liao (UCL)
-- Victoria Pagan (Florida)