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Graduate Student Conference—Dept. of Classics, University of Toronto—April 1–2, 2016The graduate students of the Department of Classics invite papers that will explore how ancient thinkers, authors, and artists negotiated the paradoxes of vision and its relation to truth, however truth may be conceived. Although seeing and knowing were deeply linked both linguistically and conceptually, the relation between the two was not entirely transparent. Perception and misperception informed the ancients’ understanding of their own realities in potentially disruptive and/or distorting ways. We aim to investigate how visual perception operated as a medium of comprehension, and how it continues to shape our own sense of the ancient world.We welcome submissions from all subdisciplines of Classics that will engage with the ancient tensions between seeing and knowing, seeming and being, perception and reality. Potential paper topics may include, but are not limited to:ancient theories of visual or other sensory perceptionmodern theoretical approaches to visuality: film theory, affect theory, theories of the gazenarrative ekphrasis and/or enargeia as literary constructions of visual realitythe relation between visual/material and literary representations of narrativeoptical illusion and distortion in art and architecturevisualizing gender and sexualityvisuality and veracity, autopsy and inquiry in ancient historiographical narrativerhetoric, persuasion, and the representation of “truth”visuality in politics: performativity, spectacle, and powerthe optics of dramatic performance and hyper-reality on the stagePlease submit abstracts (.doc/.docx/.pdf) of no more than 300 words, for papers of 15-20 minutes in length, to utoronto.grad.classics at gmail.com by February 1, 2016.  Participants will be notified by email.