Penn Public Lecture: Emily Greenwood (Harvard) “Classics and the Grammar of Loss in the Black Feminist Tradition”

Lecture Series:
The Penn Public Lectures on Classical Antiquity and the Contemporary World

The Recovery of Loss:
Ancient Greece and American Erasures

Speaker: Emily Greenwood, Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature, Harvard University

Respondent: Kate Meng Brassel

Lecture 2: “Classics and the Grammar of Loss in the Black Feminist Tradition”

Abstract: In the second of her Penn Public Lectures on Classical Antiquity and the Contemporary World, Emily Greenwood will analyze the intricate grammar of loss in the writings of Anna Julia Cooper and Mary Church Terrell. Cooper and Terrell both took degrees in Classics and subsequently taught Latin: the lecture will suggest that close attention to their frequent use of conditionals has much to teach us about the need for sharper epistemological recovery in inventorying African American loss, and much to teach us about the scope of how Cooper and Terrell imagined Black womanist futurity.

The series is supported by the Arete foundation in honor of Edward E. Cohen.