Event

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: David Eng

Lecture 3: “Remembering Differently: Classical Alibis in contemporary fiction from Fran Ross to Ocean Vuong”

Abstract: In the third of her Penn Public Lectures on Classical Antiquity and the Contemporary World, Emily Greenwood will examine the use of classical, mythological alibis to center marginalized, queer subjects in American fiction of the last fifty years. Tracing an arc from Philadelphia novelist Fran Ross to the works of Ocean Vuong, the lecture will consider these classical alibis as hopeful figures for the constructive role that the study of ancient Greek and Roman Classics can play in the recovery of loss in recent American history.

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