George B. Walsh Lecture Series

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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.

2020-2021 George B. Walsh Lecture

  • Prof. Emily Greenwood, Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Classics and the University Center for Human Values Princeton University
  • “Optative Citizenship: Mary Church Terrell on Knowing Greek and Black Women’s Suffrage”
  • March 4, 2022 at 4:30PM in Social Sciences 122

Previous George B. Walsh Lecturers:

  • 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.