Session 3

3:30–4:30 P.M.

Looking for Women Painters in Ancient Greece and Rome

Piecing together different forms of evidence—literary, visual, and archaeological—this lecture explores the virtually forgotten role of women painters in the ancient Greek and Roman past.

"When We Remember Zion"—Songs of Love, Loss, and Life

For its Humanities Day performance, the New Budapest Orpheum Society performs a diverse repertoires of 20th-century Jewish music. Drawing on diverse genres and languages—Hebrew, Yiddish, German, and Russian, to name a few—the songs of the NBOS have been uncovered from the destruction of pogroms and the Holocaust; others filled the smoky backrooms of cabarets; and still others are among the most exquisite examples of European art song, past and present.

**6 seats are available for this presentation.**

New Faculty Books in Creative Writing

From fiction to poetry to literary translation, from Latin American modernism to the contemporary poetry of war, from a modern-day Apollo and Daphne to the zombie apocalypse, Creative Writing faculty Rachel Galvin, Will Boast, and Ling Ma will read from and discuss their fascinating new books. Moderated by Director of Creative Writing John Wilkinson, the panel will also consider questions of literary influence in an expanded field, the relationship between teaching and writing, and how these two aspects of a writer's career complement and complicate each other.

Animal Cognition in Antiquity

From Jane Goodall to Finding Nemo to YouTube cat videos, the behavior of animals continues to fascinate humans. This panel of three graduate students from the Classics Department will look at how several ancient Greek authors voiced this fascination and how they viewed the behavior of animals, including mating fishes, dancing elephants, and talking pigs. Just as animals are both intimately recognizable and strange to us humans, these Greek texts are at once familiar and exotic.

What Is Real in Classic Fairy Tales? Truth, Fantasy, and Hope in Contemporary America

National traditions of folk and fairy tales saw in the “people” (the German Volk) its mythic origin. What did “people” mean in early-modern Italy, where the first literary fairy tales were written? And how did the concept of “people” mutate when the center of this literary tradition moved to France and then to Germany? Finally, we will try to identify the concept of “people” in the American interpretation of Western fairy tales, in particular in our contemporary political context dominated by racism and xenophobia.

Rebecca West

Rebecca West taught courses and wrote scholarly books and articles on modern Italian literature, literary texts by women authors, and on film adaptation, among other cinema topics, for 40 years until her retirement in 2013. One of her current projects focuses on Patricia Highsmith's novels that are set in Italy. West is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Distinguished Service Professor Emerita in the Departments of Romance Languages and Literatures and Cinema and Media Studies.

Christopher Taylor

Chris Taylor is a scholar of Caribbean and African-American literatures from the 18th and 19th centuries. His research interests include black political thought, the cultures of slavery and antislavery, and the history of freedom. His first book, Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism, was published in 2018 (Duke University Press). Currently, he is working on a new book project, titled The Voluntary Slave: Atlantic Modernity’s Impossible Subject. Taylor is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature.

Richard Strier

Richard Strier is the author of The Unrepentant Renaissance from Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton—winner of the Warren-Brooks Prize for Literary Criticism—as well as Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts and Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert's Poetry. He has coedited several interdisciplinary collections, including Shakespeare and the Law:  A Conversation Among Disciplines and Professions. Strier is the Frank L.

Amber Ginsburg

Amber Ginsburg creates site-generated projects and social sculptures that insert historical scenarios into contemporary situations, and engages current histories to imagine alternative futures. Her background in craft orients her projects toward the continuities and ruptures in material and social histories. Ginsburg is a Lecturer in the Department of Visual Arts.

Andrei Pop

Andrei Pop is an art historian interested in the relation of art and science, in dramatic and narrative art (what is usually called classicism), and in how modernity deals with the past. He has published a book on the Anglo-Swiss painter Henry Fuseli (1741–1825), and a translation of Karl Rosenkranz’s 1853 Aesthetics of Ugliness. Pop is an Associate Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the Department of Art History.

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