Correction appended.
Scholars and academics from four continents have arrived in Providence for the second half of "The Classics Renewed: The Latin Poetry of Late Antiquity." Part two of the two-part conference begins today and runs through Saturday.
This is the first event held at Brown in the field and among the first worldwide. Conference organizer Joseph Pucci, associate professor of classics and comparative literature and lecturer for the program in medieval studies, said the conference is something he and Scott McGill of Rice University have been planning since 2009.
Though the conference will be the largest to specifically target late Latin scholarship, it is preceded by a German conference on decadence in late antiquity, as well as the first half of this weekend's conference, which took place at Rice in March.
The 12 speakers from the March portion of the conference will participate as audience members at this week's leg of the conference, which will feature 19 speakers.
The size and diversity of the conference are due to the University's history of strength in classics and the recent emergence of late Latin poetry as "the sexy field" in classical scholarship, Pucci said.
The first day of the conference will begin at 4 p.m. at the Annmary Brown Memorial.
An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the German conference on decadence in late antiquity. The Herald regrets the error.
