Jackson Lectures

The Department of Classics at Harvard University conducts a public lectureship in memory of Carl Newell Jackson (Harvard College Class of 1898). The Jackson Lectures are delivered annually by a scholar on a classical subject. Below is a chronological list of lectures.

YearLecturer(s)Title
2025
“Nationalism, origins and the politics of Latin literature”
2023
Rosalind Thomas
"'...than the Chariots of the Lydians': Archaic Lydia and the Greeks"
2015
Barbara Borg
"The Roman art of commemoration"
2014
John Haldon
"Goldilocks in Byzantium: the paradox of East Roman survival"
2013
Mark Griffith
"Music and difference in Ancient Greece"
2011
Brad Inwood
"Ethics after Aristotle"
2008
Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg
"Isaac Casaubon"
2005
Crawford Greenwalt
"Sardis"
2002
First Jackson Colloquium
"War, culture, and imperialism in the Roman Republic"
2000
Claude Calame
"Time in ancient Greece: heroic narrative, poetic memory, ritual pragmatics"
1998
Katherine Dunbabin
"Conspicuous conviviality: images of the Roman banquet"
1996
Myles Burnyeat
"Freedom, anger, tranquillity: an archaeology of feeling"
1994
Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood
"Greek tragedy and Athenian religion"
1992
Peter Dronke
"Verse with prose: from Petronius to Dante"
1990
Anna Davies
"Greek dialects"
1987
Fergus Millar
"The Roman Near East"
1984
Machteld Mellink
"Greeks and West Anatolians"
1982
Walter Burkert
"Ancient mysteries: faith and functions"
1980
E. J. Kenney
"Ovid"
1978
Eugene Vanderpool
"Marathon"
1976
Peter Brown
"The making of late Antiquity: social and religious change from Aelius Aristides to St. Anthony"
1974
Jacqueline de Romilly
"Magic and rhetoric in ancient Greece"
1972
Denys Page
"Folk tales in Homer’s Odyssey"
1968
Arnaldo Momigliano
"The development of Greek biography"
1966
Roger Mynors
"The transmission of the Latin classics"