KU News Release

Hall Center announces start of spring Humanities Lecture Series

LAWRENCE — Anthony Corbeill, professor of classics at the University of Kansas, will present “Androgynous Gods, Androgynous Nouns and the Invention of Heterosexuality in Ancient Rome” at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 5, at Alderson Auditorium in the Kansas Union. Part of the Hall Center for the Humanities’ 2008-09 Humanities Lecture Series, Corbeill’s lecture is supported by the Friends of the Hall Center and is free and open to the public.

Corbeill has published two books, “Controlling Laughter: Political Humor in the Late Roman Republic” and “Nature Embodied: Gesture in Ancient Rome.” He has also published on ancient sexuality, education and Latin poetry. His current book-length project is titled “The Boundaries of Sex and Gender in Ancient Rome.”

Corbeill received his bachelor’s from the University of Michigan and master’s and doctoral degrees in classical languages from the University of California-Berkeley. He has held the American Philological Association fellowship to the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae in Munich, Germany, a comprehensive dictionary of the Latin language (1990-91), and a postdoctoral fellowship at the American Academy in Rome (1994-95). He has recently been awarded a visiting fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford University.

Founded in 1947, the Humanities Lecture Series is the oldest continuing series at KU. More than 150 eminent scholars from around the world have participated in the program, including authors Vladimir Nabokov and Aldous Huxley. Recent scholars have included Edward Said, Dava Sobel, Sherman Alexie and E.O. Wilson. Shortly after the program’s inception, a lecture by one outstanding KU faculty member each year was added to the schedule.

The spring 2009 Humanities Lecture Series also includes the award-winning writer, composer and musician James McBride, who will present “The Color of Water: The Search for Identity” on Feb. 24. Dipesh Chakrabarty, the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, will close the series April 20 with “The Decline and Prospect of Universal History.”

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