Congratulations to U of T Classics Professors George Boys-Stones, Boris Chrubasik, and Victoria Wohl, who were all recipients of SSHRC Insight Grants for their respective research.
Professor Boys-Stones received an Insight Grant for his project "Clement: an early Christian contribution to ancient epistemology and ethics."
"This project offers a new study of the epistemology and ethics of the Christian writer Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150-215 CE). The study is conceived as a contribution to our understanding of ancient epistemological and ethical thought; but it is also designed as a case-study in promoting the integration of Christian texts into mainstream histories of ancient philosophy. To this end, it will include not only a study of Clement's thought, but a new translation of the most important relevant text."
Professor Chrubasik received an Insight Grant for "Sealings and Lives of Maresha," in collaboration with Dr. Kathryn Stevens (Corpus Christi College, Oxford University), Dr. Ian Stern (Hebrew Union College), and Dr. Chris J. Young (University of Toronto).
"Sealings and Lives of Maresha is a project that aims at once to publish, analyse and conserve an individual corpus of great historical importance; to add a significant facet to our understanding of Hellenistic imperialism on the ground, and to create a lasting model for the digitisation and analysis of sealings from the ancient world."
Professor Wohl received an Insight Grant for her project "The Poetics of Early Greek Philosophy."
"Ever since Plato’s famous expulsion of the poets from his philosophical republic, “the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy” (Rep. 606e-608b) has been the topic of intense scholarly interest. My proposed project seeks to understand the relation between poetry and philosophy by returning to a moment before that quarrel arose. It investigates the poetics of the so-called Presocratic philosophers, writing in Greece from roughly 600 to 400 BCE. These writers invented new ways of thinking about the natural world, human life, and the nature of reality. In doing so, they also conceived new means of expression. The active interrelation between these two innovations is the focus of my project. Through sustained analysis of the Presocratics’ use of language, it examines how their literary form shaped their new modes of thought. Further, by tracing key images and ideas in texts of early Greek philosophy and poetry, it seeks to illuminate the Presocratics’ experimental poetics by situating them more firmly within their contemporary context. More broadly, it asks how we should conceptualize the relation between philosophy and poetry at a historical moment before their Platonic falling-out."