Cultural Disruption and the Ancient Greek Tradition, or : How to Write Literature in a Brand New World

The conquests of Alexander the Great and the wars of his successors transformed notions of ethnic identity, led to mass migrations and displacements, and forever reshaped political structures and religious and civic institutions. In the aftermath of these disruptions, poets writing in the newly formed, multiethnic Hellenistic megacities sought to demonstrate the continuity of the literary tradition in a fundamentally changed cultural and political context.

Please join us for this talk that explores how these writers negotiated this tension, and it raises larger questions about the way that artists operate in times of epochal change.

Alexander Sens is Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Markos and Eleni Tsakopoulos Kounalakis Professor of Hellenic Studies at Georgetown University. He teaches courses on Ancient Greek and on Greek literature. Dean Sens studies the poetry of the late Classical and Hellenistic periods and is particularly interested in the ways in which the authors of these ages engage with antecedent literature to create meaning in profoundly new literary and cultural contexts. In addition to more than 50 articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries and numerous book reviews, he is the author or co-author of six books.

Location: Auditorium, Georgetown University in Qatar