Martin Ostwald Memorial Lecture
Martin Ostwald, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor Emeritus of Classics.
Read a profile of Professor Ostwald in The Bulletin
SEPTEMBER 27, 2024
Sheila Murnaghan, Alfred Reginald Allen Memorial Professor of Greek at the University of Pennsylvania, will present the Ostwald Memorial Lecture at 5pm in Science Center Cuniff Hall 199: "Taming the Extraordinary: Shifting Motives and the Psychology of Tragic Actors".
November 3, 2023
Brad Inwood, the William Lampson Professor of Philosophy and Classics at Yale University, will present the Ostwald Memorial Lecture at 5pm in Singer Hall 033 - "Doing the right thing: from Socrates to Cicero and beyond". All are welcome.
November 29, 2022
Catherine Conybeare, the Leslie Clark Professor in the Humanities at Bryn Mawr College, will present "Quid est ergo tempus? Augustine, Music, and Time" at 5pm in Science Center 101. All are welcome.
2021 lecture postponed
2020 lecture postponed
2019 lecture
James Porter '77, Professor and The Irving Stone Chair in Literature, Rhetoric and Classics Program in Critical Theory, University of Berkeley, CA will present the eighth annual Martin Ostwald lecture on Monday, November 4, 2019 at 4:30 in Science Center 199: "What Did Homer See?".
2018 Lecture
Irad Malkin, Israel Prize Laureate for History, 2014; Visiting Professor, Classics, Oxford University; Cummings Chair for Mediterranean History, Tel Aviv University, will present the seventh annual Martin Ostwald lecture on Monday, October 29, 2018 at 4:30 pm in Science Center 199: "The Greek Lottery: Equality, Fairness, and Law in Archaic Greece".
2017 Lecture
Emily Greenwood, Chair and Professor of Classics at Yale University, will present the sixth annual Martin Ostwald lecture on Monday, October 2, 2017 at 4:30 in Science Center 199 Cuniff Hall. "A Human Being is Not a Thing: Aristotle's Politics and the Complex Legacies of Classics".
2016 Lecture
C. Brian Rose, James B. Pritchard Professor of Archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania, will present the fifth annual Martin Ostwald lecture on Wednesday, October 5, 2016 at 4:30 pm in Science Center 199 Cuniff Hall. "Are We Rome?: Ancient and Contemporary Approaches toward the Iconography of War and Triumph" will consider the designs of war memorials in both antiquity and the twentieth century, concentrating on the evolving iconography of power, conflict, and lamentation. The focus is on memorials constructed during the Greek and Roman periods, as well as those that have been erected in the last fifty years. Iconographic elements from Classical antiquity frequently appear in twentieth-century designs, but we have entered a new period in the formulation of triumphal monuments, wherein artistic responses to violence, identity, and memory are very different from what one would have experienced in antiquity.
2015 Lecture
Ralph Rosen '77, Vartan Gregorian Professor of Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, presents "Greek Comedy, Aesthetics, and the Question of 'Popular Culture'"
2014 Lecture
Ineke Sluiter, Professor of Humanities at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society, "Tough Words, Soft Hearts"
2013 Lecture
Carol Dougherty, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Classical Studies at Wellesley College, "Improvising the Self in Homer's Odyssey"
2012 Lecture
Leslie Kurke, Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor, Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley, "Before Statuary: Victor Statues, Commemoration, and Power"
