John Marincola, Professor of Classics at Florida State University, will lecture at Yale Divinity School on Thursday, March 28. Marincola will address “Writing Contemporary History in the Ancient World.” The lecture takes place at 5:30 p.m. in Niebuhr Hall with a reception to follow.
The event is co-sponsored by the Department of Classics, the Judaic Studies Program, and the Divinity School.
Marincola describes his Yale lecture as follows:
The contemporary historian was a fixture of the cultural landscape of Greece and Rome from the time of Thucydides onwards. Thucydides expresses without reserve the superiorities of contemporary over non-contemporary history, and his successors repeat these claims with great self-confidence and assuredness. Yet such claims often mask serious underlying issues. This paper explores the recognition (both in the historians and other writers) of the problematic nature of many of these claims, and some of the “anxieties” associated particularly with the writing of contemporary history in Greece and Rome.