A distinguished classicist is invited annually to give a lecture in honor of the memory of George B. Walsh, eminent classicist, literary scholar, and member of the University of Chicago Classics Department.
2024-2025 George B. Walsh Lecture
Christopher B. Krebs
Gesue and Helen Spogli Professor of Italian Studies, Professor of Classics, and, by courtesy, of German Studies and Comparative Literature at Stanford University
“Two Cultural Critics: Sallust and Adorno, in Conversation”
Previous George B. Walsh Lecturers:
- 2020/2021: Emily Greenwood, "Optative Citizenship: Mary Church Terrell on Knowing Greek and Black Women’s Suffrage”
- 2019/2020: Harriet Flower, “The Most Expensive Slave in Rome”
- 2018/2019: Johanna Hanink, “Cultural Intimacy in Classical Athens”
- 2017/2018: Andrew Riggsby, “When does I + I = II? Quantification as Performance”
- 2016/2017: Ruby Blondell, “The Gods Made Me Do It! The Divine Defense of Helen of Troy”
- 2015/2016: Joy Connolly, "The Promise of the Classical Canon: Hannah Arendt and the Romans"
- 2014/2015: Richard Hunter, "Myth, Fiction, and Homeric Criticism"
- 2013/2014: Andrew Ford, “The Purpose of Aristotle's Poetics”
- 2012/2013: Jan Ziolkowski, “Medieval Conceptions of Imitation and the Classical Tradition”
- 2011/2012: Andrew Laird, “Aztecs on Olympus: Latin authors of the indigenous nobility in Mexico after the conquest”
- 2010/2011: Sandra Blakely, “From Dardanus to the Philosophers: Initiation and Imagination in Roman Samothrace”
- 2009/2010: Peter Wiseman, “Encounters on the Via Sacra: Imagining Roman Literature”
- 2008/2009: Claude Calame, “Heroic Death, Political Cult, Tragedy and Gender in Classical Athens: Praxithea, Erechtheus and their Daughters”
- 2007/2008: Denis Feeney, “Crediting Pseudolus: trust, credit, and belief in Plautus’ Pseudolus”
- 2006/2007: Richard P. Martin, “What the Gods Want: Theological Poetics in the Homeric Poems”
- 2005/2006: Greg Woolf, “A Roman Writes a Postcard Home: Pliny the Younger, Roman Imperialism, and 84 Charing Cross Road”
- 2004/2005: Page duBois, “The History of the Impossible: Ancient Utopias”
- 2003/2004: Michael Putnam, “Vergil and Tibullus 1.1: Two Versions of Pastoral”
- 2002/2003: Mark Griffith, “Horse Power and Donkey Work: Equines and the Ancient Greek Imagination”
- 2001/2002: Nicholas Purcell: “Place of Pleasure: Revisiting Ancient Baiae”
- 2000/2001: Helene Foley “Choral Identity in Greek Tragedy”
- 1999/2000: Paul Allen Miller, “Why Propertius Is a Woman: French Feminism and Latin Love Elegy”
- 1998/1999: Leslie Kurke, “Ancient Greek Board Games and How To Play Them”
- 1997/1998: Shadi Bartsch, “Ars and the Man: The Politics of Art in Vergil’s Aeneid”
- 1996/1997: Marilyn Arthur Katz, “Did Athenian Women Attend the Theater in the Eighteenth Century?”
- 1995/1996: James E.G. Zetzel, “Natural Law and Poetic Justice”
- 1994/1995: David Konstan, “Friends and Patrons”
- 1993/1994: Niall Slater, “Passion and Petrifaction: The Gaze in Apuleius”
- 1992/1993: Froma Zeitlin, “The Origin of Woman and Woman as the Origin: The Case of Hesiod’s Pandora”
- 1991/1992: Stephen Hinds, “Medea in Ovid: Scenes from the Life of an Intertextual Heroine”
- 1990/1991: Anne Carson, “How Not to Read a Poem: Unmixing Simonides from Protagoras”
- 1989/1990: Anne Pippin Burnett, “Signals from the Unconscious in Early Greek Poetry”
The Division of Humanities website contains further information about the lecture and a full listing of previous speakers.