2025-26 Stubbs Lecture in Classics
Translating the Violence of the Iliad
Hybrid Lecture
Tuesday, October 7, 4:30 - 6:00 p.m. ET
In-person and online (followed by a reception)
Paul Cadario Conference Centre at Croft Chapter House
15 King’s College Circle, Toronto ON M5S 3H7
*This event is free and all are welcome, though registration is required and seating is limited for in-person attendance.
Presented by
Emily Wilson
Department Chair & Professor of Classical Studies
College of Women Class of 1963 Term Professor in the Humanities
University of Pennsylvania
In the 2025-26 Stubbs Lecture in Classics, Translating the Violence of the Iliad, Professor Emily Wilson of the University of Pennsylvania will assess the challenges of interpreting and translating Homeric scenes of violence and massacre. She will suggest that the idea of force as inherently “dehumanizing” runs through influential critical assessments of the poem, and argues that this set of modern ideas about violence is informed by the modern history of warfare and political thought, which is fundamentally different from what is found in the Iliad itself. Wilson will treat the central theme of violence as an important test case in the limits and possibilities for understanding and recreating the alien features of ancient poetics and imagination. She will also use it to discuss a core challenge of her own work as a translator: how to convey the features of Homer that modern readers may find surprising or even incomprehensible.
Register for In-person Attendance
To attend this lecture in person and register for the ensuing reception, please complete the form at the link below and submit a registration under the name of each person who plans to attend.
Register for Virtual Attendance
To attend this lecture virtually, please click the link below. A webinar link will be sent to the email listed on the registration. Please submit a registration under the name of each person who plans to attend. You must register to access the webinar link.
About the Speaker
Emily Wilson is Department Chair and Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, holding the College for Women Class of 1963 Term Professor in the Humanities. Wilson attended Oxford University (Balliol College B.A. in Classics and Corpus Christi College M.Phil. in Renaissance English Literature) and Yale University (Ph.D. in Classics and Comparative Literature). She has been named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance & Early Modern scholarship, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. She has published three monographs and numerous essays about ancient literature and its later receptions, and verse translations of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and some plays of Euripides, Sophocles and Seneca. She lives in Philadelphia.
The Stubbs Lectures were founded in 1988 by Helen Eunice Stubbs, a graduate of University College, in honour of her father, Samuel James Stubbs, also a UC graduate. The lectures commemorate his love of Classics and of English Literature. Learn more about our Endowed Public Lectures.