The Department of Classics invites you to the
Twenty-Seventh Annual Carl C. Schlam Memorial Lecture
Speaker
Professor Nandini Pandey (Johns Hopkins University)
Lecture
"Roman Diversity and the Classical Archive: Nine Muses of Critical Fabulation"
We’ve all heard about the nine Muses: the daughters of Memory (Mnemosyne) and Power (Zeus, the king of the gods) who preside over ancient Greco-Roman literature, from epic to tragedy to history.
But what of all the women forgotten by history and other elite genres, people without socioeconomic or political clout who nevertheless played essential roles in building the worlds, livelihoods, and imaginative landscapes that sustain our Greco-Roman archive and the discipline of “classics”?
Via “nine muses of forgetting,” this experimental talk surveys evidential and methodological challenges and hopes of retelling ancient Mediterranean stories from below, recentering dominant narratives from marginalized perspectives, and innovating new directions in classical studies that honor diverse voices that didn’t get to speak for themselves within our literary and archaeological record.
All are welcome and no prior knowledge of classics is expected!