A Response to Misleading Lady: The Enclosures of Belle da Costa Greene by Carolyn Funk, 30 April 2021

I’ve been to the Morgan Library once. To consult a manuscript that the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley had with him in the boat when he drowned. As some of you may know, Shelley died in a shipwreck in the Bay of Spezia, off Italy’s Western coast on 8 July 1822. According to his biographer Richard Holmes, back in England the news of his death was greeted with the announcement ‘Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry has been drowned; now he knows whether there is a God or no.’ I have not been able to verify this quote but I cite it for what it says about Shelley’s reputation at the time of his passing. He was not an unknown poet, but he was a poet most often mentioned in attacks on his morals – atheist, proto-feminist, proto-socialist, who once claimed that – and this is a verified quote – the ‘invidious distinction of human kind […] into two sexes, is a remnant of savage barbarism’.

Penelope’s Odyssey, Sappho’s Tale: Studying Women’s Songs from Ancient to Modern Greece with Andromache Karanika

21.Apr..2021 12:00 PM in Pacific Time

This talk will take us on a journey of the tradition of folk songs and poetry from antiquity to contemporary examples while also discussing the experience of a Greek classicist working on oral tradition. With a methodology of “excavating under the words” it argues that the women’s song and poetry tradition and also lived experienced shaped much of the ancient poetry. With examples from Homer, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Sappho, and ballads and folk songs from contemporary Greece we will seek to uncover women’s voices and experiences. Special emphasis will be given to the theme of “NOSTOS,” leaving one’s homeland, constructions of desire for one’s former space, returning or not, and more.

(Feb 4) Classics, Creativity and Survival with Sarah Nooter

Both the field of Classics and the Humanities in general are often said to be in a state of crisis, or even to be on the verge of collapse or apocalypse. In this lecture, Dr. Nooter briefly contextualize these claims within the history of Anglophone education, suggesting that they have always been in a state …