2008 Schedule

November 6 & 7:

Speakers include the following distinguished statesmen and leading thinkers on ancient politics:

Josiah Ober (Constantine Mitsotakis Professor of Political Science and Classics, Stanford University)

Lecture Title: Democracy, Innovation, and Learning
4 p.m. Thursday, November 6, 2008 (Alexander Reading Room)

Josiah Ober holds the Constantine Mitsotakis Chair in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. He has authored or co-authored approximately 60 articles and a number of books, including, most recently, Athenian Legacies (2005) and Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens (forthcoming 2008). In addition to his ongoing work on the politics of knowledge and innovation, he is developing a project on the emergence of centralized and dispersed systems of political authority.


Danielle Allen (UPS Foundation Professor, Institute for Advanced Study)

Lecture Title: The Authority of Philosophy: On Ideas and Political Influence
8 p.m. Thursday, November 6, 2008 (Alexander Reading Room)

Danielle Allen is widely known for her work on justice and citizenship in ancient Athens and its application to modern America. She is the author of The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens (2000) and Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown vs. the Board of Education (2004). In 2002 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for her ability to combine "the classicist's careful attention to texts and language with the political theorist's sophisticated and informed engagement." She holds doctorates from both Cambridge (in Classics) and Harvard (in Government) and is currently the UPS Foundation Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study.


Stephen Salkever (Mary Katherine Woodward Professor of Political Science, Bryn Mawr College)

Lecture Title: Constructing Philosophical Conversations: We Moderns, the Ancients, and the Problem of Democracy
4 p.m. Friday, November 7, 2008 (Alexander Reading Room)

Stephen Salkever was educated at Amherst College and the University of Chicago and has taught for many years at Bryn Mawr College, where he is the Mary Katharine Woodworth Professor in the Department of Political Science. He is the author of Finding the Mean: Theory and Practice in Aristotelian Political Philosophy (2006), editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Greek Political Thought, and author of numerous articles, chapters, and reviews on ancient, modern, and contemporary political philosophy.

Dana Gioia (Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts)

Lecture Title: The Role of Art in Human Community
3 p.m. Thursday, November 13, 2008 (Foyer of Meditation, Armstrong Browning Library)

Gioia is a poet and critic. His influential book, Can Poetry Matter? began as an essay of that title in The Atlantic and sparked widespread discussion about the role of literature and the arts in a democracy. A longtime commentator for the BBC, Gioia's most recent volume of poetry, Interrogations at Noon, won the American Book Award.