"Cleopatra: Performing Power" Spring Humanities Seminar with Dr. Alison Futrell
Feb. 24, 2024
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Cleopatra: Performing Power
Professor Alison Futrell
Dates/Times: Wednesdays from 6 - 8 PM (AZ Time) on MARCH 13, 20, 27, APRIL 3, AND 10, 2024
Location: Online via Zoom and on the University of Arizona campus at the Poetry Center
Tuition: $165
Course Description
This course focuses on Cleopatra VII (69-30 BCE), the far-famed last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt and a key powerbroker during a period of important political change. Her legacy in the Western world emphasizes her actions as a “romantic” agent, a deployer of “feminine wiles”, a hostile representation drawn by her opponents. A broader examination of Cleopatra's context demonstrates her connections to a number of dynamic royal women in the Hellenistic world, all image-makers in their own right, wielding female authority and patronage in a cosmopolitan, multicultural world. This course will sift through the evidence for Cleopatra VII, both the contentious (and largely hostile) material on her Mediterranean activities as well as the Egyptian record, which incorporates the specific efforts of the queen herself to assert her legitimate imperial authority and structure her collaboration with major stakeholders in the Hellenistic East.
Professor Alison Futrell focuses on the performance and imagery of power in imperial Rome, with a special interest in spectacle, gender, and pop culture. She has authored and edited Blood in the Arena, The Roman Games, and The Oxford Handbook of Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World, as well as pieces on Viking Queen (1967), Spartacus (1960 and 2010-13), HBO’s Rome (2005, 2007) and Xena: Warrior Princess (1995-2001). She appeared as a talking head most recently for National Geographic, BBC History Extra, and the History Channel’s eight-part series "Colosseum."
More information can be found online at hsp.arizona.edu/cleopatra