This event is part of the series New Work in the Arts & Humanities: The Body.

The American Academy in Rome opens its 2018–19 programming season with a lecture by Mary Beard, a renowned scholar of antiquity and a writer and blogger on women in society today. She will explore the idea of the human body in classical sculpture: female and male, normative and conservative, subversive and transgressive. Beard’s lecture will aim to pull apart the image of the body in classical sculpture as a dead weight on our imagination, and to follow the edgy awkwardness that the work of the Greeks and Romans bravely faced. Her topics will range from Praxiteles to Jenny Saville, from Kenneth Clark to twenty-first-century feminism.

Beard’s lecture inaugurates a thematic series of events organized in 2018–19 on “The Body,” which will consider the body—by way of past artifact and present reality—as a site of subjectivity and meaning in the arts and humanities today.

Beard is professor of classics at Newnham College, University of Cambridge. She is the author of eighteen books on society and culture in the ancient world, including The Parthenon (2002), The Roman Triumph (2007), and Women and Power: A Manifesto (2017). Since 1992 she has been the classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement, which also hosts her blog, A Don’s Life. Beard is the 2019 Lucy Shoe Meritt Resident in Classical Studies and Archaeology at the American Academy in Rome.

The event will be held in English. Watch it at https://livestream.com/aarome.

Christina Huemer Lecture

Christina Huemer was the Academy’s first Drue Heinz Librarian (1992–2007) and deeply committed to the many Academy Fellows, Residents, and readers in the Arthur and Janet C. Ross Library. The Christina Huemer Lecture Series was established by Academy Trustee C. Brian Rose in celebration of her devotion to great scholarship and creativity.