The Classics Department will host guest speaker Daniel Mendelsohn on Friday, May 9, at 6 p.m. in Kemper Auditorium. Mendelsohn is the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College, and the editor-at-large of the New York Review of Books. He has written widely on literature, culture, and history, including memoirs about discovering his ancestors in the Holocaust, teaching the Odyssey at Bard with his father as a student, and about gay identity intersecting with classical mythology. In his most recent published work, Mendelsohn offers a vibrant new translation of Homer’s Odyssey, a text which will be central to his talk. The event is open to the public, and the Andover Bookstore will be available for book purchases, with a book signing at the end of the program.

Mendelsohn’s talk is the keynote event in the department’s first colloquium centered around the Charles H. Forbes Vergiliana collection, housed in the Academy’s Archives & Special Collections. We are happy to partner with Paige Roberts, director of archives & special collections, in this exciting endeavor.