Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics Jesse Weiner presented a paper at the Celtic Conference in Classics that took place July 19 to 22 at McGill University and the Université de Montréal. Weiner was part of a panel on “Landscapes of War.” The panel ran as its own intensive mini-conference throughout the four-day event.

Weiner’s paper, “Monuments, Memory, and Alternative Facts in Lucan’s Bellum Civile,” examined the ways in which the Latin epic poet Lucan presents monuments as a metonymy for empire and manipulates these mnemonic artifacts to reorient Roman social memory.

As a contemporary illustration of the ways monuments and their reception can create and redirect social memory, Weiner discussed Lucan’s civil war poetry alongside a set of World War II monuments in the former Yugoslavia.