[Usyd_Classics_Events] Critical Antiquities Returns!

[Ben Brown]

Dear all,

The Critical Antiquities Network is pleased to announce that the 2026 Critical Antiquities Public Lecture will be delivered by Page Dubois, Distinguished Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego. The title of her lecture is, ‘Blind Spot: Marxism in U.S. Classics.’

The event will be held on Wednesday, 25 February 2026, 9:30-11:30 (Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra time).

Here are the times and date in other locations:


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Los Angeles/Vancouver: Tuesday, 24 February, 14:30
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Chicago/Mexico City: Tuesday, 24 February, 16:30
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New York: Tuesday, 24 February 17:30
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Santiago/Buenos Aires/Rio de Janeiro: Tuesday, 24 February, 19:30
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Dublin/Belfast/London: Tuesday, 24 February, 22:30
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Paris/Berlin/Rome: Tuesday, 24 February, 23:30
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Johannesburg/Athens/Cairo: Wednesday, 25 February, 00:30
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Beijing/Singapore/Perth: Wednesday, 25 February, 06:30
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Tokyo: Wednesday, 25 February, 07:30
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Darwin: Wednesday, 25 February, 08:00
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Brisbane: Wednesday, 25 February, 08:30
  *
Adelaide: Wednesday, 25 February, 09:00

The event will take place in a hybrid format, with the lecture delivered on Zoom and an in-person element held at the Vere Gordon Childe Centre Boardroom, University of Sydney.

To register for the Zoom link, please sign up for the Critical Antiquities Network mailing list to receive Zoom links and CAN announcements: https://url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/8Y_NCyojxQT2w22G9FZfxIxvZ_B?domain=signup.e2ma.net<https://url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/8Y_NCyojxQT2w22G9FZfxIxvZ_B?domain=signup.e2ma.net>

Here is the abstract for Page’s lecture:


              G.E.M de Sainte-Croix, in his massive text The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, makes a crucial point about the avoidance of the term class in the work of historians of Greek and Roman antiquity: "Whereas descriptions of ancient society in terms of some category other than class--status, for instance--are perfectly innocuous, in the sense that they have no direct relevance to the modern world . . . an analysis of Greek and Roman society in terms of class, in the specifically Marxist sense, is indeed . . . something threatening, something that speaks directly to every one of us today and insistently demands to be applied to the contemporary world, of the second half of the twentieth century." (The Class Struggle, p. 45) The original first edition of this book contained a reproduction of Van Gogh's Potato Eaters, an image of the poverty and desolation of the exploited and wretched of the earth.

              What I am concerned with in this lecture is the threat that de Sainte Croix sees, and the attempt to thwart it, the hostility to Marxist theory, to anarchism, socialism, communalism and communism, that characterize the history of the United States of America, and the consequences for immigrants, people of color, women, queers, for university education, the humanities, and the discipline of classical studies in particular. In this moment, when the US is being wracked by new leadership's descent into neofascism and return to unbridled imperialism, it's time to enrich critique with the legacy of Marxist critical theory. This lecture derives from work in progress on the progressive voices in classical studies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I consider some examples of US responses to Marxism in classics, including the cases of Moses Finley and Jean-Pierre Vernant, then ask briefly: Could we use the theory of Antonio Gramsci to read Euripidean tragedy differently?



We hope to see you there,

Tristan Bradshaw
Ben Brown
Tom Geue
Andy Poe


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