EVENT
August 28, 2025
Hellenic Studies Seminar Series 2025-2026
When:
Wednesday, October 8, 2025 | 18:00
Where:
Deree Faculty Lounge, The American College of Greece
Organized by:
The Institute for Hellenic Culture and the Liberal Arts – The American College of Greece
Speaker:
K. Scarlett Kingsley
Visiting Associate Professor in Classics at Deree – The American College of Greece
The seminar is free and open to the public and can also be attended via Zoom. The link will be provided on the day of the event and sent via email to those opting for online participation.
The seminar will be followed by a reception.
About the seminar:
The talk explores the shifting significance of Plataea, site of the allied Greek victory over the Persians in 479 BCE, in early nineteenth-century British travel writing. While the Greek War of Independence fostered a philhellenic vision of Plataea as a timeless emblem of liberation, earlier accounts reveal strikingly divergent interpretations. Travelogues by Hugh William Williams, Edward Dodwell, John Cam Hobhouse, and Edward Daniel Clarke negotiate ancient freedom alongside the realities of contemporary Ottoman rule. Their accounts reveal how classical sites could be invested with competing meanings — of decline, renewal, conquest, and emancipation. By following in the path of the travel writers, the talk demonstrates how Plataea functioned as a contested symbol where ancient Greek history and modernity converged in the Romantic imagination.
For more information, please contact us at [email protected]
About the speaker:
K. Scarlett Kingsley is a Visiting Associate Professor at The American College of Greece. She previously served as Associate Professor of Classics at Agnes Scott College and was the 2024-25 Elizabeth A. Whitehead Scholar at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. An intellectual historian of fifth- and fourth-century Greece, her research examines the intersections of historiography and philosophy. She is the author of Herodotus and the Presocratics: Inquiry and Intellectual Culture in the Fifth Century (CUP, 2024) and co-editor of The Authoritative Historian: Tradition and Innovation in Ancient Historiography (CUP, 2022). She is currently co-authoring, with Tim Rood, Land, Wealth, and Empire in Herodotus: Reading the End of the Histories (forthcoming, OUP) and co-editing, with Giorgia Proietti, The Oxford Critical Guide to Herodotus’ Histories (forthcoming, OUP).