Professor Ellen Oliensis, Klio Distinguished Professor of Classical Languages & Literature, Professor of Comparative Literature. University of California, Berkeley.
Friday, October 8, 2021. 3 PM in HSSB 4080.
UCSB Classics 2022 Argyropoulos Lecture
‘Tragedy and Revolución: Refashioning Ancient Greek Drama in the 20th Century Hispanic Caribbean’
By Professor Rosa Andújar, King’s College, University of London
This lecture discusses the manner in which ancient Greek drama assumed a new afterlife in the twentieth century Hispanic Caribbean. Focusing on the invocation of Greek drama in three distinctive political volatile contexts (the Cuban Revolution, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo’s dictatorship, and amidst struggles for independence in US-occupied Puerto Rico), it illustrates the ways in which Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican artists turned to ancient tragedy and comedy to comment upon the urgencies of their present. The talk reveals Greek drama’s unique resonance across this distinctive cultural and hybrid space.
Professor Woolf’s Sather lecture series on The Rhythms of Rome explored the seasonal cycles of Roman society, the annual pulses of energy and torpor, the expansion and contraction of imperial power, the alternation of periods of frantic mobility with an annual disconnect that fragmented social networks and left governors, armies, and distant provinces to fend for themselves, in short the project of stretching an imperial society over spaces that swelled and shrank with the seasons. This lecture, the second in the sequence, considers the annual rhythms of growth and shrinkage in the greatest cities and in the smallest ones, their transformations in scale and texture and the human mobility this entailed.
