[Usyd_Classics_Events] REMINDER: USYD Classics Research Seminar: May 26 LESLIE KURKE

[Ben Brown]

Dear Friends of Classics and Ancient History at USyd,

It is with great pleasure that I invite everyone to the final seminar in our Research Seminar Series for Semester 1 , 2025. We are delighted this year to host Professor Leslie Kurke of UC Berkeley as the William Ritchie Memorial Lecturer for 2025. Prof. Kurke is very well-known internationally as one of the finest students of early Greek literature whose studies of Pindar and Herodotus (among many others) are seminal contributions that have transformed the way scholars approach these extraordinary texts. In this seminar she will tackle Euripides’ famous play Hippolytus. I hope you can all attend!

[please note:  This presentation will not be hybrid and in person only]

Best, Ben

May 26th (Monday, 12.15pm UTC+10) in the Boardroom of V. Gordon Childe Centre

Leslie Kurke (William Ritchie Memorial Lecturer/ University of California, Berkeley)

Through a Glass Darkly: The Mirror in Euripides’ Hippolytus

Abstract:
This paper considers Phaedra’s image of time exposing the evil among mortals as if “proffering a mirror to a young girl” in Euripides’ Hippolytus (Hipp. 428-30) and offers a new interpretation of these lines rooted in ancient Greek beliefs about the female body, female physiology, and stages of maturation. The paper then charts the refractions of the mirror image as it applies to Hippolytus and Theseus in the second half of Euripides’ play.

Leslie Kurke has spent much of her research life working on ancient Greek literature and cultural history-especially archaic Greek poetry, Herodotus, the ideology of form, and various interactions of word and world, literature, and its “others” (the economics of literature, poetry and/as ritualization, text and popular culture, the dialectic of performed song and place/monuments). She is currently completing a book, co-authored with Richard Neer, entitled Pindar’s Sites: Song and Space in Classical Greece.

She has taught at UC Berkeley in Classics and Comparative Literature since 1990 and has also taught as a visitor at Princeton University, Wellesley College, and the University of Chicago. Her teaching in two departments ranges across much of archaic and classical Greek literature, gender and sexuality in Greek and Victorian cultures, literary theory, Elvis, detective fiction, and psychoanalysis.
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