Helen Morales, the 2023 Martin Lecturer, will present a series of four lectures titled Art, Activism and Ancient Fiction from October 30 - November 3. These lectures will offer bold new interpretations of the ancient texts, and claim a place for them as avant-garde works that speak to us today about redefining familial, social, and cultural relationships.
Read in dialogue with artist Harmonia Rosales, and with reference to modern novels and movies that have been influenced by them, ancient fictional texts have much to say about resistance to oppression, and ‘the danger of a single story’, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie puts it.
The fourth (and final) lecture in the series is "Heliodorus' Blackness".
Helen Morales is the Argyropoulos Professor of Hellenic Studies at UC Santa Barbara. A classicist and cultural critic, she has a wide range of interests in the ancient world. These include the ancient novel, Greek imperial poetry, mythology, literary criticism, sexual ethics, diversity, and pilgrimage. These interests are always connected to major contemporary concerns – leadership, class, race, sexual politics, aesthetics, law – a better understanding of which, in her view, comes through appreciating their investment in the classical antiquity. Helen received her PhD from the University of Cambridge.
