Department of Classical StudiesThe Penn Public Lectures on Classical Antiquity and the Contemporary World will be delivered by visionary scholars of ancient Greece and Rome. The invited speakers will come to Penn as Visiting Professors for a weeklong residency, during which they will present public lectures, visit classes, run workshops, and contribute to the life of the department.
Some elements of ancient Greek and Roman cultures find echoes, and often deliberate citation, in U.S. politics, architecture, education, and culture. History can be traced with greater and lesser degrees of analytical responsibility, and in ways that sometimes enable and sometimes impede a reach toward social justice. A renewed engagement with antiquity will invigorate conversation on urgent topics of the day including race, gender, freedom, empire, the uses of violence, the contours of personal and national identities, interactions between nature and culture, popular sovereignty, and the pursuit of happiness.
We aim for the series to bring wider publics into the dialogue between past and present, and deepen insight into the modes by which producers of culture fashion the present out of what precedes it.
The Penn Public Lectures will mobilize the benefits to the public good in the United States of a lively, rigorous, and timely engagement with the classical past.
The inaugural event will be held at the Penn Museum in April of 2022.