David Scourfield, professor of classics and head of the classics department at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, will deliver the Winslow Lecture at Hamilton College on Monday, Oct. 7 at 4:10 p.m. in the Red Pit, Kirner-Johnson building. The lecture, titled "Love, Death and the Ancient Imagination," is free and open to the public.
Born in Bristol, England, Scourfield studied in Wales and at Jesus College, Oxford, from which he received an M.A. and D.Phil. He has been Parliamentary Clerk in the House of Lords and has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. His work focuses on late-antique literature, death in antiquity, and the ancient novel. His publications include Consoling Heliodorus: A Commentary on Jerome, Letter 60 (Oxford, 1993). He has contributed to the 1996 edition of The Oxford Classical Dictionary, and is an editor of the Classical Review.
His lecture will explore some of the ways in which love and death are associated in the European tradition and the classical world. Language and myth, from Homer to Roman elegy to Petronius, provide the main material for his investigation, but he will also offer glimpses of such key post-Classical figures as Schubert, Freud, Dürer, and Sarah Michelle Gellar.
