Gregory Nagy's Lectures
(a selection, going backward from 2009)
June 1, 2009: University of Patras (on the occasion of the conferral of a doctoral degree honors causa): “Κύκλος as a symbol for collegial research.”
April 1, 2009: Aristotelian University, Thessaloniki (on the occasion of the conferral of a doctoral degree honoris causa): “The poetics of metabasis in a Hellenistic Hymn to Zeus.”
March 4, 2009: Wesleyan University of Illinois, “The Fragmentary Muse.”
November 22, 2008: University of Tallinn, Estonia, “Language and Meter: the ancient Greek hexameter.”
April 16, 2008: Howard University. Frank Snowden Memorial Lecture, “The reception of Homer in the era of Vergil.”
April 25, 2008: Bryn Mawr College, Agnes Michels Memorial Lecture: “The edition of Homer by Aristarchus.”
June 20, 2008. Oxford University, Corpus Christi College: “The Aiakidai in Song 13 of Bacchylides.”
March 28, 2008: Yale University: “Traces of Heroic Romance in Archaic Greek Epic.”
Feb. 23, 2007: Stanford University: “Mousike, Performance, and Culture in Plato's Laws.”
Dec. 7, 2007: Harvard University: Christopher Memorial Lecture: “Egyptian Myth and the Poetics of C.P. Cavafy.”
Nov. 5, 2007: The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore: gave a seminar on Pindar's Aeginetan Odes.
Oct. 25, 2007: Chicago Art Institute: Readings from the Homeric Odyssey, sponsored by the Onassis Foundation
Oct. 11, 2007: Parthenon Museum in Nashville TN: Readings from the Homeric Odyssey, sponsored by the Onassis Foundation
Oct. 9, 2007: Harvard Club in Boston: gave a talk on the ancient Olympics and other athletic festivals.
July 23-30, 2007: Harvard Olympia Summer Program in Greece: I taught a block seminar on Thucydides.
June 5, 2007: University of Basel in Switzerland: “The Fragmentary Muse and the Poetics of Refraction”
June 1, 2007: Museum of Fine Arts in Houston: Readings from the Homeric Odyssey, sponsored by the Onassis Foundation
May 26, 2007: University of Rethymno in Crete: “Ibycus and Anacreon.”
February 6, 2006: Introduction and commentary at a dramatic reading of selections from the Odyssey at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington. This event was jointly sponsored by the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation (USA) and the Embassy of Greece.
October 21, 2005: Johns Hopkins University's "Anthropology and Classics" conference: "Performative Poetics in Homer and Virgil."
October 17, 2005: Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation (New York City, USA): "Selections From Homer's Odyssey."
April 14, 2005: Distinguished Lecture for 2005 at the University of Delaware: "Lives of Homer." The following is Professor Nagy's summary of his lecture:
"This talk centers on the surviving texts of ‘Life of Homer’ narrative traditions, to which I refer simply as Lives of Homer. These Lives, it is argued, can be read as sources of historical information about the reception of Homeric poetry. The information is varied and layered, requiring diachronic as well as synchronic analysis. The Lives portray the reception of Homeric poetry by narrating a series of events featuring ‘live’ performances by Homer himself. In the narratives of the Lives, Homeric composition is consistently being situated in contexts of oral performance. In effect, the Lives explore the shaping power of positive and even negative responses by the audiences of Homeric poetry in ad hoc situations of oral performance."
December 4, 2004: Harvard Club of Boston's annual Saturday Symposia: "Verbal Art Looks at Visual Art: The Case of Homer."
November 4, 2004: Remarks following the reception of an honoris causa degree from the Université Charles-de-Gaulle-Lille 3 in Lille, France. The degree was presented by the University's President, Doctor Philippe Rousseau. Read in English or French.
February-March, 2002. Sather Classical Lectures, University of California at Berkeley
May 25, 2000: 11th annual Cornell-Harvard-Lille International Colloquium, University of Lausanne, “Orphic Elements in the Text of Homer.”
May 6, 2000: Furman College, seminar on the applications of Information Technology to the Classics.
April 28, 2000: NYU, Rose-Marie Lewent Conference on Ancient Studies, “Rethinking Postwar French Thought on Antiquity.”
April 14, 2000: SUNY Buffalo, “Mantic Elements in Homeric Poetry.”
April 8, 2000: Yale University, “Homeric Poetry as Genre.”
March 19, 2000: Université de Montréal, “Homère et Platon à la Fête de la Déesse.”
March 18, 2000: McGill University, “The Textualization of Homer.”
March 16, 2000: Gordon Gray Lecture at Harvard, “Writing as a Classicist: The Art of Reading Slowly.”
March 10, 2000: Humanities Center at Harvard, joint lecture with Patrick K. Ford, “Ulaid and Iliad.”
February 4, 2000: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, “Sappho and Other Poets of Greek Lyric.”
June 23-25, 1999: “The Library of Alexandria,” sponsored by the new National Library in Paris, in conjunction with the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, International Congress.
May 14-16, 1999: Indiana University, A Symposium on Myth, “Overview and Concluding Remarks”
May 1999: Cornell University, 10th annual Cornell-Harvard-Lille International Colloquium, “The Semiotics of the Shields in the Seven Against Thebes.”
April 15, 1999: Case Western University, Cleveland, convention of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South, “Technology and the Teaching of Classics.”
April 1, 1999: University of Washington, Seattle, “The Idea of the Library as Cosmos and Corpus.”
November 10, 1998: University of Odense, Denmark, “Textualizing Homer.”
May 30, 1998: University of Lille, 9th annual Cornell-Harvard-Lille International Colloquium, “Bacchylides and Ancient Classical Scholarship.”
May 4-6, 1998: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon , International Seminar on “Europe and Culture,” “The Idea of the Library as a Classical Model.” Participated in a panel with Jacqueline de Romilly and Hélène Ahrweiler on “The Classical and Humanist Matrix in the 20th Century.”
September 7, 1997: University of Bonn, colloquium “Oral Epic: Performance and Music,” keynote lecture, “Epic as Music: Rhapsodic Models of Homer in Plato’s Timaeus and Critias.”
June 7, 1997: Princeton , Cornell-Harvard-Lille International Colloquium IX , “Homeric humnos as a rhapsodic term.”
April 16, 1997: The Johns Hopkins University, sponsored by the Classics Department, “The Poetics of cross-reference in Homer.”
March 22, 1997: Harvard Divinity School, International Conference on Pergamon, “The Library at Pergamon.”
March 7-9, 1997: University of Georgia, Augusta, sponsored by the Classics Department, “Homer at the Panathenaia: Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives.”
January, 23-24, 1997, University of Tennessee at Knoxville, sponsored by the Classics Department, “Did Sappho and Alcaeus ever meet?”
March 27, 1996, King’s College, University of London, “Mimetic Aspects of the first person in Pindar.”
November 9, 1995: Colgate University, John E. Rexine Memorial Lecture, “Improvising at Greek Drinking Parties.”
October 23-26, 1995: Université Stendhal (Grenoble III), “Sappho as a Singer of Songs.”
October 23, 1995: Colloque international “Homère en France après la Querelle (1715-1900),” “Les éditions alexandrines d’Homère au XVIIIe et au XIXe siècle.”
June 22, 1995: University of Freiburg i/B, Verschriftung - Verschriftlichung: Aspekte des Medienwechsels in verschiedenen Kulturen und Epochen, Symposium des Teilprojekts C1 im SFB 321, “Epic as ‘Script’ in the Hellenic World of Late Antiquity.”
March 28 and 30, 1995: Indiana University, Patten Foundation Lectures, “Archaic Lesbian Poetics” and “The Poetic Worlds of Sappho and Alcaeus.”
December 29, 1994: American Philological Association Annual Convention, Presidential Panel, “Classical Graduate Programs as a Paradigm for the Humanities and Social Sciences.”
December 28, 1994: American Philological Annual Convention, Linguistics Panel, “Traces of ‘Normal Mycenaean’ in the First Millennium [BCE],” “Editing Homer, Rethinking the Bard,” (also panel chair).
October 21, 1994: colloquium on “Literary and Cultural Studies Today, A Tenth Anniversary Celebration of the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies at Harvard,” “Textual Editing: The Most Conservative Practice, or the Most Radical?”
June 20-2, 1994: University of Arizona, Tucson, National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute, “Homer and Panhellenism,” and “Homer and Cult Heroes.”
May 29, 1994: University of California at Berkeley, Heller Homer Colloquium (invitation from Classics graduate students at Berkeley), “Aristarchus’ Homer.”
May 9-11, 1994: Cornell, 5th Annual CORHALI conference, “The First Song of Demodokos.”
April 27, 1994: Harvard University, M. Victor Leventritt Memorial Lecture, “The End of the Iliad and the Beginnings of the City-State.”
January 13, 1994: Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, “Démétrius et les rhapsodes.”
January 7, 1994: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, “Le rossignol des troubadours et la mouvance homérique.”
March 28-31, 1993: Washington University, St. Louis, Henry and Penelope Biggs Resident Classics Scholar, “The Poetics of Mouvance,” “Sappho’s Song 1,” and “The Seal of Theognis.”
October 22, 1993: University of Missouri, “The End of the Iliad and the Beginning of the Polis.”
October 7 , 1993: Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington, D.C., “An Evolutionary Model for the Making of Homeric Poetry.”
September 30 - October 2, 1993: Johns Hopkins University, Conference on Apollo and Dionysus, “The Poetics of Cinara in Horace Odes 4.1.”
September 13-16, 1993: University of Grenoble, France, International Colloquium on Milman Parry, “The Text-Fixation of Homeric Epos.”
May 19,1993: Oxford University, “Evolutionary Models for the Making of Homeric Poetry.”
May 10-14, 1993: University of Cambridge, Gray Lectures , “Poetry as Performance: Ancient Greece and Beyond,” a series of three lectures; 1: “Aristarchus’ Quest for the Real Homer and the Poetics of Mouvance in the Art of a Troubadour; 2: “Mimesis and the Making of Identity Through Poetic Performance”; 3: “Dead Poets and The Seal of Theognis.”
May 15-17, 1993: University of Lille, 4th Annual CORHALI Conference, “Genre and Occasion in Sappho and Alcaeus.”
April 17, 1993: University of Pennsylvania, Conference on “Recovering Horace for the Curriculum,” “Genre and Occasion in Horace.”
March 12, 1993: CCNY/CUNY Confeence on Social Justice, “The Poetics of Dikê.”
January 15, 1993: University of Calgary, “The Making of Homeric Poetry and the Peisistratean Recension.”
January 14, 1993: University of Victoria, “Linear B and the Shield of Achilles.”
January 13, 1993: University of British Columbia, Vancouver, “Linear B and its Usefulness for Classicists.”
January 12, 1993: University of Saskatchewan, “Metaphorical Perspectives on the Heavens and the Atmosphere.”
January 11, 1993: University of Alberta, Edmonton, “Evolutionary Models for the Making of Homeric Poetry.”
October 27, 1992: MIT Forum, “Metaphors for Self-Reference in Oral Poetics: Examples from Classical Persian and Greek,” with O. M. Davidson.
September 10, 1992: State University of New York, Buffalo, “Authority and Authorship in Hesiod.”
October 1-3, 1992: Athens, Greece, International Congress of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and the Revue d’Anthropologie du Monde Grec Ancien, Plenary Address, “Genre and Occasion.”
April 25-26, 1992: 3rd Annual CORHALI Conference, “Aristotle on Homer and Tragedy: Brief Remarks on the Poetics.”
April 8-10, 1992: University of Wisconsin, “Evolutionary Models for the Diffusion of Epic.”
April 3, 1992: Harvard/Boston University Conference on the Greek Chorus, “Aspects of Performance in Archaic Greek Choral Lyric.”
February 29, 1992: Harvard Alumni in Chicago, “Greek Heroic Ideals: Imitation and Re-enactment.”
January 15-18, 1992: Bad Homburg, Germany, International Conference on Greek Tragedy, “Lyric Genres in Tragedy.”
December 29, 1991: American Philological Association, Chicago, Presidential Address, “Homeric Questions.”
December 12-13, 1991: University of California, Irvine, “The Poetics of Memory in Ancient Greece.”
November 7, 1991: Harvard, Scientific Club, “Concepts of Truth in Ancient Greek Civilization.”
October 25, 1991: St. John’s College, Annapolis, “Myth and Exemplum in Homer.”
October 16, 1991. M.I.T., Workshop on Humanisitc Perspectives on Atmospheric Change, “Ancient Views of Nature and Culture.”
June 19, 1986: Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg , “Homerische Epik und Pindars Preislieder: Mündlichkeit und Aktualitätsbezug,” also served as Gastprofessor for the Sonderforschungsbereich on Oral Poetics.