The Department of Classics invites you to the
Twenty-Fifth Annual Carl C. Schlam Memorial Lecture
"Vergil’s Other Aeneid"
Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer
(The University of Chicago)
The Speaker
Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer works on Roman imperial literature, the history of rhetoric and philosophy, and on the reception of the western classical tradition in contemporary China. Her five books range across such topics as the ancient novel, Neronian literature, political theatricality, and Stoic philosophy, the most recent of which is Persius: A Study in Food, Philosophy, and the Figural (Winner of the 2016 Goodwin Award of Merit). She has also edited or co-edited 7 wide-ranging essay collections (two of them Cambridge Companions) and the “Seneca in Translation” series from the University of Chicago. Bartsch’s new translation of Vergil’s Aeneid is forthcoming from Random House in 2020; in the following year, she is publishing a new monograph on the contemporary Chinese reception of ancient Greek political philosophy.
Bartsch-Zimmer has been a Guggenheim fellow, edits the journal KNOW, and has held visiting scholar positions in St. Andrews, Taipei, and Rome. Starting in academic year 2015, she has led a university-wide initiative to explore the historical and social contexts in which knowledge is created, legitimized, and circulated as director of the new Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge.
The lecture
Vergil’s Aeneid is by now recognized as a complex poem rather than an endorsement of empire. But beyond that, it is a palimpsest: in writing the Aeneid Vergil was drawing a new (but transparent) narrative layer over the narrative the Romans knew best, that of Aeneas as the traitor who gave up Troy to the Greeks.