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Classicist Helen Morales brings expertise and a probing intellect to her fresh understanding of ancient myth in Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths. This challenging reckoning with the legacy of Greek and Roman myths explores everything from Beyoncé’s use of imagery to the origins of #MeToo.
‘Helen Morales has produced a passionate, deeply felt account of the ways in which myths have reinforced the most harmful narratives of social control … infused with a lifetime’s scholarship but remains clear, approachable and very personal.’ Charlotte Higgins, Guardian
Stephanie McCarter’s vivid new verse translation of Ovid’s influential poetic epic, Metamorphoses, takes an ‘unapologetically feminist’ approach, she says. Stripping away euphemism, it offers a more accurate reading of the Latin text, especially of the power dynamics that are central to many of the stories told in it. ‘The world of the Metamorphoses is both deeply strange and surprisingly familiar,’ she writes. ‘Ovid helps me understand both the beauty and brutality of the world I inhabit.’
Helen Morales and StephanieMcCarter will be in conversation online from the US.
No booking required. Watch here from Friday January 27th, 6 pm.
Helen Morales holds the Argyropoulos Chair in Hellenic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Classical Mythology: A Very Short Introduction and Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths. Morales taught previously at the University of Cambridge, where she was a Fellow of Newnham College, and has been a Fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington DC.
Stephanie McCarter is Professor of Classical Literature at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee.She has published translated work on Horace and has written for Sewanee Review, Eidolon, Electric Literature and The Millions. Her new verse translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses is published by Penguin Classics.
