We are delighted to welcome Professor Katherine Harloe (Institute of Classical Studies) to Aberdeen, to deliver the Geddes-Harrower-Lectures 2024. Over four free, public lectures, taking place on the University’s Old Aberdeen campus, Professor Harloe will speak about:
A Potted History of Classics from the Margins
The lectures will reconsider the history of Classics and Classical Archaeology, recovering lost voices that shaped the discipline decisively. The lectures will explore the significance of class, race, sexuality and gender for the shaping of Classics – identities and categories that already haunted the work of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the founding father of modern Altertumswissenschaft.
In revisiting the discipline’s history, the lectures also ask for the place of classical learning in today’s academia and society, questions that are of renewed urgency as the sector ponders about the future of the humanities.
The lectures will take place on:
13 February 2024, 6pm, King’s Conference Centre
15 February 2024, 6pm, New King’s 01
19 February 2024, 6pm, New King’s 01
21 February 2024, 6pm, King’s Conference Centre
All lectures are FREE and open to the public. Lecture 1 and 4 are followed by a wine reception.
About the Speaker
Katherine Harloe is the Director of the Institute of Classical Studies, the national centre for the promotion and facilitation of research in Classics and related disciplines throughout the UK and abroad.
She is an interdisciplinary classicist whose research spans the history of classical scholarship, the reception of Greek and Roman antiquity in European culture from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, the history of political thought and gender history. She is known particularly for her work on the eighteenth-century scholar Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the so-called 'father' of classical archaeology, and has also published on authors ranging from Sappho, Thucydides and Pausanias to Hannah Arendt and Walter Pater.
She is currently working on a study of Winckelmann's queer love letters and is also principal investigator of 'Beyond Notability: Re-evaluating Women's Work in Archaeology, History and Heritage in Britain, 1870 - 1950', a three-year (2021-24) project that explores the potential of historical archives to uncover hidden histories of scholarship and is pioneering new modes of public engagement in partnership with the Society of Antiquaries of London.
About the Geddes-Harrower-Chair
The Geddes-Harrower-Chair in Greek Art and Archaeology was established through a bequest by John Harrower (1857-1933), Professor of Greek at Aberdeen. It is named in honour of Harrower and his father-in-law (and predecessor as Professor of Greek) William Geddes. The Geddes-Harrower-Chair is a visiting Professorship and has brought, over the last sixty years, some of the most renowned historians of Greek Art to Aberdeen. Previous Geddes-Harrower Professors include Bernard Ashmole, Robin Osborne, Brunilde S. Ridgway, Mary Beard and Milette Gaifman.