#and this agonic competition (like a music festival) took place there called mouseia | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

jackredfieldwasmyjacob · 2 years ago

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What's your PhD about?

I haven't started it yet cause I'm looking for funding first so this might change (also I've altered the PhD propossal depending on the professor that would be my supervisor) but basically I want to study the Muses through the lens of Cultural Memory.

The ideal thing would be to study them and their evolution throughout ancient Greece, but that's impossible so for example my current PhD director suggested I should focus on the Archaic Era (also the Dark Ages, so around the 10th to 6th centuries BCE more or less). I am very interested in the relationship between identity, literacy, and religiosity, so the Muses are perfect for it, as they were used by the Greeks as a sort of fact-check for aoidoi and poets, which were the preservers of Cultural Memory.

Most stuff that's been written about the Muses has always been very philological and especially related to the 'invocation of the Muses' so prevalent in Greek literature. I want to open the scope to new angles, something never done before, and I have experience working with Cultural Memory from my Master's Thesis, so I thought it would be a cool approach :) It's gonna be much more theoretical than you would expect, but I love that sorta thing. Also it's impossible to separate the Muses from literacy so I'll be looking at written sources for sure, my good pal Hesiod (whom my Undergrad Thesis was about) will occupy a good chunk of the research I'm afraid.

So yeah, that's it. This won't happen if I don't get funding tho, so I could just never write this Ph.D. Who knows.

#ask #sorry for the lengthy answer anon i've had to write so many phd proposals in the past few months i just go with the autopilot #i hope it's comprehensive enough. and please feel free to ask more questions!! i am very passionate about this so i would love #to answer more stuff like this :)#i'm currently researching my second master's thesis btw #it's gonna be about the cult of the muses in thespiai #so a bit of context #the heliconian muses (which are like the 'canon' muses; the ones described by hesiod) 'originated' around helicon mt #this is a real place in boeotia greece #the valley of this mountain is the valley of the muses. hesiod lived right there #in ascra.#ascra at some point was conquered by the city of thespiai. and it was part of it for the rest of ancient greece #(this happened very early on btw. like probably 8th or 7th century)#there was a sanctuary of the muses built in the vale #and this agonic competition (like a music festival) took place there called mouseia #it became incredibly important #but the thing is. this all happened in the hellenistic era (so 2nd - 1st centuries BCE)#there is barely any evidence of anything muses related in thespiai before that #noticeably it was in the hellenistic era when hesiod really became famous #so i want to study the evolution of the cult of the muses in thespiai; the evidence (or lack thereof) for it; and its instrumentalization #by thespiai #i'll mostly do it through epigraphy cause 1) it's the source i'm most comfortable with and 2) there's not really much else #i'll also sprinkle in cultural memory and some heavy theoretical stuff in there just for fun #so yeah i'm having fun with it :) hopefully i'll finish it by october!

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