Tags: Guest speaker

This event is presented by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts and by the UGA Humanities Council as part of the university's 2025 Humanities Festival. It is also part of UGA's Spring Signature Lecture Series.

Ferdia Lennon was born and raised in Dublin. He holds a BA in History and Classics from University College Dublin and an MA in Prose Fiction from the University of East Anglia. Glorious Exploits is his first novel. A Sunday Times bestseller, it was adapted for BBC Radio 4 and was the winner of the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction for 2024. After spending many years in Paris, he now lives in Norwich with his wife and son.

Glorious Exploits was published in the U.S. by MacMillan in 2024, and will be released in paperback in March, 2025. Along with winning the Waterstones and Bollinger prizes, it was shortlisted for the Nero Book Award for Debut Fiction (formerly the Costa Book Awards) and for the Newcomer of the Year by the Irish Book Awards, and was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal of Excellence.

From the publisher:

On the island of Sicily amid the Peloponnesian War, the Syracusans have figured out what to do with the surviving Athenians who had the gall to invade their city: they’ve herded the sorry prisoners of war into a rock quarry and left them to rot. Looking for a way to pass the time, Lampo and Gelon, two unemployed potters with a soft spot for poetry and drink, head down into the quarry to feed the Athenians if, and only if, they can manage a few choice lines from their great playwright Euripides. Before long, the two mates hatch a plan to direct a full-blown production of Medea. After all, you can hate the people but love their art. But as opening night approaches, what started as a lark quickly sets in motion a series of extraordinary events, and our wayward heroes begin to realize that staging a play can be as dangerous as fighting a war, with all sorts of risks to life, limb, and friendship.

Told in a contemporary Irish voice and as riotously funny as it is deeply moving, Glorious Exploits is an unforgettable ode to the power of art in a time of war, brotherhood in a time of enmity, and human will throughout the ages.

Is 'fiction' a transhistorical and transcultural concept? Gregory Currie (2014) says 'yes'. In this talk, I argue that we ought to be skeptical of such a universal notion of fiction because 'fiction' is a concept that responds to a philosophical culture's given metaphysical framework. Observing how ancient Greek metaphysics affects analytic philosophy of fiction, and comparing it with how classical Chinese metaphysics affected their theories (and practice) of fiction shows us what the aims and methods should be for (analytic) philosophy of fiction.

Hannah Kim is an Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona. She received her PhD in Philosophy and PhD minor in Comparative Literature from Stanford University. She works on aesthetics, metaphysics, and Asian philosophy.

Greg Lavender shares his thoughts on "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Cultural Evolution of Computational Thought from Pythagoras to the AI Era"

Greg Lavender is executive vice president, chief technology officer and general manager of the Software and Advanced Technology Group at Intel Corporation. He received his BS from UGA in computer science as well as his MS and Ph.D. in computer science from Virginia Tech.

Introducing Greg Lavender shares his thoughts on "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Cultural Evolution of Computational Thought from Pythagoras to the AI Era"

Greg Lavender is executive vice president, chief technology officer and general manager of the Software and Advanced Technology Group at Intel Corporation. He received his BS from UGA in computer science as well as his MS and Ph.D. in computer science from Virginia Tech. Let us welcome our esteemed alumnus!

From logical positivism to fundamental ontology, philosophy in the first third of the 20th century joined the chorus of various modernisms calling for doing away with the past, here specifically the doing away with Judeo-Christian metaphysics. The difficulty with any move that determines a position in opposition to another is that the other position needs to be presupposed. Many philosophers admit that such a presupposition entails a metaphysical reversal concluding that we cannot simply get out of metaphysics. 

I will argue that there is a hitherto unnoticed affinity between certain strands of modern philosophy—especially in the wake of Heidegger—that posit an action without effects and hence irreducible to a metaphysics of presence and the Stoic way of constructing the relation between being and acting. Besides offering a different way to grasp a series of concepts such as the event, poetry and difference from an alternative historical perspective, this has the potential to find a way around the metaphysical reversal that has haunted philosophy for a century.

Dimitris Vardoulakis was the inaugural chair of Philosophy at Western Sydney University. Some of his books include Freedom from the Free Will: On Kafka’s Laughter (2016); Stasis Before the State: Nine Theses on Agonistic Democracy(2018); Spinoza, the Epicurean: Authority and Utility in Materialism (2020); The Ruse of Techne: Heidegger’s Magical Materialism (2024); and The Agonistic Condition (2025). He is the co-editor of the book series “Incitements” (Edinburgh University Press) and the new journal Philosophy, Politics and Critique. He is currently serving as the chair of the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy (ASCP) and Vice President of the Council of the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CHASS).

Myrsini Mamoli is an archaeologist and architectural historian with a specialization in the use of analytical and formal methods for the analysis and reconstruction of historical architecture. The key driver of her teaching and research lies on the exploration of the ways technology and computation, complementarity to traditional historical research, can shed new light in the analysis, interpretation, and reconstruction of architectural building remains.

Her area of expertise is Greek and Roman architectural history with a special research focus on the architectural form of the ancient Greek and Roman libraries. Her research on the building type definition of ancient libraries using generative grammars has been published at the Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Engineering, Design, Analysis, and Manufacturing and several peer-reviewed conference proceedings. Most recently, she has expanded her work on the automated reconstruction of architectural plans and elevations using rule-based, generative grammars to achieve variability in reconstruction within the constrains by the archaeological evidence. Currently, in collaboration with the GT computer science department, she is working on a seed-grant to develop and evaluate AI methods that generate traceable, controlled iterations of architectural reconstructions of Greco-Roman architecture.

She holds a Ph.D. in Architecture with majors in computation and architectural history (GATECH), an M.Sc. in Cultural Technology and Communication with specialization in museology (University of the Aegean, Greece), and a BA in Archaeology and Art History (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece). A native of Lesbos, Greece, she received a Fulbright fellowship, along with several awards from Greece, for her graduate studies in the USA. Before completing residency requirements in Greece and returning to Georgia Tech, she was an Assistant Professor of Art History at LSU, where she taught a series of courses on ancient Art History and a seminar on the formal specification and analysis of ornament across art history with the use of generative grammars and digital media. 

Abstract: In modern perception, the library and the museum are two separate institutions, with distinct contents each: books and artworks. In this context, modern scholarship has considered the ancient bibliotheca as a subordinate part of a larger complex, containing books. In my talk, I will draw evidence from literary sources and material evidence to propose that, at their conception, works of art and manuscripts were inseparable, presented in a cultural center, integrating the contemporary functions of a library, a museum, an art gallery, and sculptural garden. Further, I will present the design principles of libraries, I will debunk established theories of architectural identifiers of a Roman library, and I will propose the aedicular façade as a viable option for the interior of monumental imperial libraries in the Roman empire. Using shape grammars, a rule-based computational approach to analyze any given set of design principles by encoding them into rules and then applying them to generate designs within the same language, I will explore possible variation in the building typology of ancient libraries in plan and elevation, within the parameters of the archaeological evidence. 

Dr. Myrsini Mamoli Lecture Flyer

A.E. Stallings is an American poet who studied Classics at the University of Georgia and Oxford. In October 2023, she began her four-year elected term as Oxford Professor of Poetry, one of the world’s most prestigious academic honors in the field of poetry.

This event is presented by the Department of Classics, the Felson Classics Endowment, the Willson Center, the Jere W. Morehead Honors College, the UGA at Oxford Program, the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, and by the UGA Humanities Council as the opening keynote event of the UGA Humanities Festival. It is also part of the Willson Center's Global Georgia public event series and the Spring 2024 UGA Signature Lecture Series.

Link to Article

Join us for the 8th Annual Undergraduate Conference on March 16th from 9am-4pm.

Keynote Speaker Dr. Jennifer Gates-Foster at 2:30 PM

"Philological and Archaeological Inquiry in the Classical Near East"

Jennifer Stager specializes in the art and architecture of the ancient Mediterranean and its afterlives. Her areas of focus include theories of color and materiality, feminisms, multilingualism and cultural exchange, disability studies, ancient Greek and Roman medicine, performance, and classical receptions.

"Over the past few centuries, people have continuously (re)discovered the many colors of and on ancient Greek and Roman art and architecture and notions of the classical built from it. In contrast to modernity’s relentless rediscovery, colors—of materials, bodies, and nature—were once a quotidian part of antiquity. Ancient Greek philosophers sought to understand color’s ubiquity as a phenomenon indexing the visible world. At the same time, ancient artists built up all manner of objects from material colors sourced from the earth and manipulated in their workshops. Healers carefully observed the body’s changing colors to diagnose illness and worked with the earth’s material colors—with pharmaka—to restore health. Such engagement with material colors also engaged connected supply-chains and the laborers working to extract, move, and prepare them. In his analysis of Plato’s Phaedrus, Jacques Derrida foregrounds the notion of the pharmakon as both medication and poison, but reducible to neither. Building from this multiplicity, this talk considers pharmaka as both pigments and drugs to analyze the intersections of polychromy, philosophy, and medicine."

"Speaking with (Digital) Maps About Roman Amphitheaters"

Keynote Speaker Dr. Sebastian Heath at 2:30 PM