Prof. Kenneth Yu to Speak on Recent Approaches to Greek Religion

Prof. Kenneth Yu to Speak on Recent Approaches to Greek Religion

Classics | Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Program and Center for Jewish Studies Thursday, December 1, 2022 3:30 pm - 5:00 pm Taliaferro Hall, 2110

Please join us on Thursday, December 1, for a lecture by Kenneth Yu, Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Toronto. His talk is entitled "Our Terms and Theirs: Some Reflections on Recent Approaches to Greek Religion."

Prof. Yu's presentation will examine the intersection of Greek religion and postcolonial theory by uncovering the ethical and political investments of the dominant paradigms and theoretical frameworks in the study of Greek religion. He focuses on three important approaches that raise the problem of the application of modern categories to ancient contexts: the anthropological approach to Greek religion, the application of the 'lived religion' model to ancient religions, and the ontological turn in Classics. Prof. Yu argues that the use of anachronistic concepts for the study of Greek religion is inevitable and that attention to the disjuncture of our terms and the terms of the ancients in fact encourages us to interrogate our own scholarly positions.