Classicist Mary Lefkowitz to Give Lectures Apr. 14-15

Story posted April 09, 2009

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Mary Lefkowitz.

Wellesley College classicist Mary Lefkowitz will give a pair of lectures at Bowdoin College that will look at the relationship of ancient gods to humankind, and the female body and health issues in ancient Greece.

Lefkowitz's visit to the Bowdoin Campus is funded by the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation with additional sponsorship from the Department of Classics.

Lefkowitz will give the lecture "Greek Mythology and Theology" at 7 p.m. Tuesday, April 14, 2009, in Beam Classroom, Visual Arts Center. The lecture is co-sponsored by the Department of Religion.

Why is it that the study of the Judeo-Christian god is called theology, but the study of the ancient Greek gods is called mythology? Although modern mythological narratives tend to trivialize the ancient gods, ancient narratives of the myths explored and explained the relationship of the gods to humankind, and played the same role in their lives as the Bible does in modern monotheistic religions. Lefkowitz's talk will concentrate on the Iliad, the religious narrative that had the widest and longest influence in Greco-Roman antiquity.

Lefkowitz's second talk, titled "The Female Body in Ancient Greece," will be given at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 15, in Beam Classroom, Visual Arts Center. This lecture is co-sponsored by the Gender and Women's Studies Program.

Although ancient Greek and Roman artists and sculptors portrayed the exterior of women's bodies with great accuracy and appreciation, few people at the time seem to have had a good understanding of women's interior organs. Theories linked women's mental behavior to abnormalities in their reproductive systems, and ultimately served as a form of social control. Lefkowitz will discuss the treatment of hysteria and breast cancer, as well as the practice of female circumcision in Hellenistic Egypt.

Mary Lefkowitz is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emerita in the Humanities at Wellesley College. She earned her Ph.D in classical philology at Radcliffe College (Harvard University) and holds an honorary degree from Trinity College/Hartford, the University of Patras in Greece and Grinnell College.

In 2004 she received a Radcliffe Graduate Society Medal, and in 2006 she was awarded a National Humanities Medal "for outstanding excellence in scholarship and teaching." In 2008 she was the recipient of a Wellesley College Alumnae Achievement Award.

Her articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Republic and the New York Review of Books.

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