Please join us in New York for a discussion between the writer and critic Daniel Mendelsohn (2017 Resident, 2010 Affiliated Fellow) and AAR director and professor of classics, Kimberly Bowes (2006 Fellow), at the Museum of Art and Design. Mendelsohn and Bowes will have a conversation about identity (gendered and otherwise) and space in both the ancient and modern worlds.

Mendelsohn is an award-winning author, critic, and translator. His essays, reviews, and articles appear in many publications. His books include the international bestseller The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, which won the National Books Critics Circle Award and the National Jewish Book Award in the United States and the Prix Médicis in France, among many other honors; a memoir, The Elusive Embrace, a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year; two collections of essays, How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken and Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays From the Classics to Pop Culture; and a two-volume translation of the poetry of C. P. Cavafy, which included the first English translation of the poet’s “Unfinished Poems.” Other honors include the PEN Harry Vursell Prize for Prose Style, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Barnes and Noble Discover Prize, the NBCC Citation for Excellence in Book Reviewing, and the George Jean Nathan Prize for Drama Criticism. A member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Association, he teaches literature at Bard College.

Bowes is an archaeologist, specializing in the archaeology of late antique religions, domestic architecture, and Roman economics. She received her BA summa cum laude from Williams College, a MA with honors from the Courtauld Institute, and a doctorate from Princeton University. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University from 2002 to 2004, she held assistant professorships at Fordham University and Cornell University, and is currently associate professor in classics at the University of Pennsylvania. Author of over thirty articles, two books, and two edited volumes, she also runs a major field project on Roman poverty in Tuscany, sponsored by the National Science Foundation. Currently Bowes is serving in her final year as director of the American Academy in Rome, where she also served as the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in Charge of the School of Classical Studies from 2012 to 2014.

You can watch this event live at https://livestream.com/aarome.

The 2016–17 Conversations/Conversazioni series is sponsored by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation.