The force of tradition in early Greek poetry and painting

The 20th Trendall Lecture will be given by Associate Professor Anne Mackay of the University of Auckland, and President of the Australasian Society for Classical Studies, on 'The force of tradition in early Greek poetry and painting'.

From her undergraduate years at the University of Canterbury, Anne Mackay developed a special passion for Athenian vase-painting, nurtured by the James Logie Memorial Collection under the care of Marion K. Steven. Consequently, her PhD from Victoria University of Wellington explored the chronological development of the great Athenian potter and painter Exekias, active in the latter half of the 6th century BC. Her fascination with Exekias continued, culminating after some 20 years of further work in her magnum opus: a monograph entitled Tradition and Originality. A Study of Exekias (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2010), still to date the most comprehensive study of this great master of archaic Athens. She has simultaneously been engaged in a comparative study of the separate but largely parallel narrative traditions of archaic Greek vase-painting and early Greek oral epic as represented by the Iliad and Odyssey, leading to new insights into the narrative techniques and strategies of both traditions; her findings have been published in a number of articles over the past decades. Furthermore, she has edited two sets of selected proceedings of Orality conferences (Leiden: Brill 1999 and 2008), as the organiser of the respective conferences in Durban 1996 and Auckland 2006. Convinced of the value for students in having direct access to ancient artefacts, she founded and curated the Museum of Classical Archaeology at the then University of Natal, Durban, and more recently has become curator of a small but growing teaching collection of antiquities at the University of Auckland. Her first academic employment was at Victoria University as a Junior Lecturer, following which she was appointed first Lecturer, then Senior Lecturer and finally Professor of Classics at the (then) University of Natal in Durban, South Africa; since 2001 she has been Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Auckland. She is currently the President of the Australasia Society for Classical Studies.

A reception will be held prior to the Lecture from 4:30pm in the Sir Llew Edwards Building Terrace Room (Building 14, Room 613) at the University of Queensland St Lucia campus. 

Registrations: This is a free event, open to the public. To register please email ASCS Conference Convenor Associate Professor Tom Stevenson on t.stevenson@uq.edu.au by 23 January 2018