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: Nancy Bentley

Lecture 1: “Tecumseh and the Shadow of Thucydides”

Abstract: In the first of her Penn Public Lectures on Classical Antiquity and the Contemporary World, Emily Greenwood will discuss the classicizing mythologization of the Shawnee leader Tecumseh in nineteenth-century accounts by white observers, focusing on the interpolation of rhetoric from Thucydides in the transmitted accounts of Tecumseh’s speech to a Choctaw Council in Mississippi in 1811. The lecture will consider the challenge that this example poses to the teaching of the history of American rhetoric and its implications for the horizons of knowledge for which we are responsible in the interdisciplinary Humanities. Greenwood will also reflect on her own lessons, as a non-native scholar, about the risk of redoubling loss by focusing on classicizing erasure in the archives to the exclusion of the living history of the Shawnee tribes.

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