Annual Sir Jeremy Morse Lecture - Past Events Listing
Sir Jeremy Morse (1928 - 2016) was Chancellor of the University of Bristol from 1989 to 2003, and the first President of the IGRCT. An annual lecture has been held in his honour, with distinguished speakers coming from around the globe, since 2017.
2023: The Seventh Annual Morse Lecture
Date: 11th May 2023
Speaker: Professor Katherine Harloe
For the IGRCT’s seventh annual Sir Jeremy Morse Lecture, we welcomed Professor Katherine Harloe, Director of the Institute of Classical Studies and Visiting Professor at the University of Reading. Professor Harloe was a Leventis postdoctoral fellow with the IGRCT at the start of her academic career.
In her lecture, entitled ‘Winckelmann’s epistolary art’, Professor Harloe examined the role played by the correspondence of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the traditional ‘founder’ of classical archaeology. Professor Harloe criticised the tendency to divide Winckelmann’s literary production into ‘private’ and ‘public’ categories. Instead, she argued that Winckelmann’s epistolary art was grounded in classical and early modern epistolary convention, and that his letters should be viewed as constructing literary personae rather than as unfiltered insights into his private thoughts. She explored the ‘queerly desiring’ epistolary personae at play within Winckelmann’s letters, and outlined their implications for how we interpret the homoerotic underpinnings of Winckelmann’s writings on aesthetics.
2022: The Sixth Annual Morse Lecture
Date: 13th May 2023
Speaker: Professor Dean Hammer
Distinguished lecturer Professor Dean Hammer, Professor of Classics and Professor of Government at Franklin & Marshall College, Pennsylvania, spoke on “Communities of Strangers: Citizenship, Identity, and Belonging" for the 2022 Morse lecture.
In the lecture, Professor Hammer argued that Ancient Rome provides a revealing glimpse into the fragile relationship between citizenship, identity, and belonging. The modern nation-state is premised on the notion that identity and belonging are organized by juridical membership rather than by our different genealogies. But there lingers a haunting question, one made more salient in a globalized world: Who are We if We are comprised entirely of Theys with different memories, identities, and pasts? Professor Hammer explored Roman texts where communities attempt to answer this question by casting citizens as Strangers, elevating particular claims of national identities and fragmenting State identities. He concluded by showing how the fragmentation of state identities plays out in our contemporary politics in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Watch the lecture here: Professor Dean Hammer "Communities of Strangers: Citizenship, Identity, and Belonging" (youtube.com)
2021: The Fifth Sir Jeremy Morse IGRCT Lecture
Date: 4th March 2021
Speaker: Professor Patrice Rankine
On the fourth of March, 2021, the IGRCT was delighted to welcome Professor Patrice Rankine, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, University of Richmond, to present a paper entitled ‘Touching the Body: Some observations on rights, punishment, and justice, with reference to Prometheus, Emmett Till, and George Floyd’.
The paper’s literary focal point was James Baldwin’s 1964 play, Blues for Mister Charlie, which adapts the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till for the stage. This courtroom drama is concerned with rights, punishment, and justice, and Professor Rankine explored how the play is an example of enduring classical themes, even in the absence of evidence of direct classical reception. In particular, Professor Rankine discussed how, even though Blues for Mister Charlie does not make any direct reference or allusion to ancient texts on justice, it invites dialogue with Aeschylus' Oresteia and Prometheus. Baldwin’s play asks classic questions about race and punishment in America that endure into the 21st century, with the killing of George Floyd a chilling coda to the past century.
Watch the lecture here: The 2021 Morse Lecture - Prof Patrice Rankine (youtube.com)
2020: The Fourth Sir Jeremy Morse IGRCT Lecture
Date: 6 March 2020
Speaker: Professor Emily Wilson
It was our great honour to welcome Professor Emily Wilson from the University of Pennsylvania, translator of Homer’s Odyssey - and now Iliad - to deliver the IGRCT’s 4th annual Morse Lecture on ‘Re-translating The Classics’. The Odyssey, in Professor Wilson’s own words, is a gripping human story in musical language. “Tell me about a complicated man…” The grand Peel Lecture Theatre provided an atmospheric environment for a lively and fascinating talk on the translation of this seminal work, both simple and complicated – “paradoxical, offbeat, meandering and weird”. “Do I want to tell a pretty lie or do I want to tell the truth?”, asked Professor Wilson of this celebration of family values, patriarchy and war featuring multiple different voices and perspectives – shifting points of view. She detailed her treatment of the parallel themes of nostos – the story of homecoming – and xenia – the idealised relationship of strangers, hosts and guests. Both can go wrong, Professor Wilson observed, and violence ensues.
This lecture can be revisted on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxB8i8po32I
2019: The Third Sir Jeremy Morse IGRCT Lecture
Date: 21 May 2019
Speaker: Professor Richard Thomas
We were delighted to welcome Professor Richard Thomas, Harvard University, as our distinguished lecturer for 2019. Professor Richard Thomas is a noted scholar of Vergil’s Georgics and its reception, and also the author of Why Dylan Matters (2017); his lecture brought together ancient poetry and modern songwriting. Observing that students of antiquity do not get a chance to observe the compositional process in action, Professor Thomas presented analyses of Dylan’s archived notebooks and audio clips from the Bootleg Series to illustrate the poet working towards the finished lyrics through writing and oral performance.
2018: The Second Sir Jeremy Morse IGRCT Lecture
Date: 8 June 2018
Speaker: Professor Martha Nussbaum
We were delighted to welcome Professor Nussbaum, University of Chicago, to speak at the second annual Morse lecture. Prof. Nussbaum’s lecture, titled ‘Anger, Powerlessness, and the Politics of Blame’, investigated the climate of simmering anger that disfigures most modern democracies, expressing itself in blaming and targeting of unpopular groups. Professor Nussbaum argued that a philosophical analysis of anger and its roots in experiences of powerlessness can help us as we move forward. She illustrated the relevance of understanding ‘Transition-Anger’ and its potential within a variety of historical contexts, from the U. S. Civil Rights movement and the thought of Martin Luther King Jr. to the life of Nelson Mandela and the activism of Gandhi.
2017: The First Sir Jeremy Morse IGRCT Lecture
Date: 25 April 2017
Speaker: Professor David Konstan
We were honoured to have Professor David Konstan, New York University, inaugurate this new lecture series in honour of Sir Jeremy Morse with an animated discussion of Aristotle and aesthetic emotions. Professor Konstan asked whether Aristotle, in the Poetics, recognised aesthetic emotions: that is, emotions evoked purely by our experience of artistic works. His talk ranged from ancient Greek tragedy to contemporary film and philosophy as he argued that Aristotle did recognise aesthetic emotions, and that when viewing tragedy what we actually experiencing are both aesthetic and, in fact, real emotions.
Watch this lecture on the IGRCT Youtube channel: Professor David Konstan on 'Did Aristotle Recognise Aesthetic Emotion?' - YouTube