The Sather Professor
A Brief History of the Professorship
A List of Sather Professors
Forthcoming Sather Professors
François Lissarrague
Visiting Sather Professor of Classical Literature, Spring 2014
Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris
Panta Kala: Heroic Warriors and the Aesthetics of Weaponry in Greek Art
February 6:
Lecture 1: Images and History: the Painter’s Choices
Maud Fife Room, 315 Wheeler Hall, 8 p.m.
February 13:
Lecture 2: Body and Armor: the Heroic Warrior
370 Dwinelle Hall, 5:30 p.m.
February 20:
Lecture 3: Animal Metaphors: Ares is in the Detail
370 Dwinelle Hall, 5:30 p.m.
February 27:
Lecture 4: The Image in the Image: Looking at Shield Devices
370 Dwinelle Hall, 5:30 p.m.
March 6:
Lecture 5: Time, Transmission, Trophies and Relics: the Display of Weapons
370 Dwinelle Hall, 5:30 p.m.
March 13:
Lecture 6: What are Pictures Made For? The Aesthetics of Violence
370 Dwinelle Hall, 5:30 p.m.
March 20:
Lecture 7: Sather Centennial Lecture by Professor Alessandro Barchiesi, University of Siena at Arezzo and Stanford University (and former Sather Professor)
370 Dwinelle Hall, 5:30 p.m.
The public is invited. Please note the different time for Lectures 2-7. Receptions follow Lectures 1 and 7.
More about François Lissarrague and his Sather lectures
The 100th Sather Professor is François Lissarrague, who has spent most of his distinguished career at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, working closely with its Centre ANHIMA (= Anthropologie et Histoire des Mondes anciens), which incorporates the former Centre Louis Gernet, for which he served as Director.
Prof. Lissarrague is one of the world's leading scholars of ancient Greek iconography. His main area of interest is the interpretation of Attic imagery: of the symposium, sport, warriors, heroes and the gods. He deals also with questions of gender and is interested in sociological and structuralist approaches to the ancient world. He is the author of many seminal books and articles. Those of his books translated into English include The City of Images (1989), The Aesthetics of the Greek Banquet (1990), Heroes and Gods of Antiquity (with Irene Aghion and Claire Barbillon) (1996) and The Athenians and Their Images (2000).
Over the course of his career, Professor Lissarrague has held positions as a visiting lecturer, fellow and conference convenor at many institutions, including the Universities of Pisa, Lausanne, Picardie, Berne, Lund, Siena, Modena, Fribourg, Oxford, Michigan, Cornell, the Getty Villa, l'Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis in Ljubljana, as well as the École du Louvre in several French cities. He gave seminars and public lectures at several Australian universities in 2008 as the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens Visiting Professor, and in 2010-11 was a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin.
About the 2014 lectures
PANTA KALA: everything is beautiful. So says Priam in the Iliad, alluding to the heroic body of a young dead warrior. This lecture series will explore several aspects of the relationship between the heroic body and weaponry as a medium expressing that beauty. It starts from a methodological assessment of the way one can use images to gain some understanding of a society, provided proper account is taken of the distortions possible between “reality” and “image.” The series will focus on the imagery of Attic vase-painting and the way painters represented heroic warriors, especially those from the Trojan cycle. Detailed attention will be paid to the relationship between body and armor, the animal metaphors used by painters decorating armor, and the system of images employed on shields, as well as to the accumulated prestige that attaches to armor through transmission and display. The final lecture in the series will discuss the relationship between beauty and violence alongside the social use of such images in Athenian society.
In honor of the Sather Lectures now having reached their centennial, a special lecture will be given to follow the series of our 100th Sather Professor. The speaker will be Professor Alessandro Barchiesi, himself a former Sather Professor, who will reflect on “100 years of Sathers.”
Forthcoming Sather Professors
(2014-15) Richard Martin, Stanford University
(2015-16) Philip Hardie, Cambridge University
(2016-17) Mary Margaret McCabe, King's College, London
