--- POSTPONED --- KL: Annetta Alexandridis: On the Difficulty of Translating: Margarete Bieber's German Readings in the History and Theory of Fine Arts --- POSTPONED ---

In response to the coronavirus, our Keynote Lectures and the corresponding Master Classes are being postponed to the coming winter semester.

While most work on Gießen's famous classical archaeologist has focused on her time and work before exile, I want to look at whether and how US American academia impacted her scholarship. The "German readings" that Bieber assembled for her American students and that she provided with a dictionary of key terms are a great entry point to this investigation. They exemplify in so many respects a 'clash of cultures' within the discipline of (what Germans still call) classical archaeology and beyond (e.g. fine arts/art history vs. science, practice as a form of scholarship vs. "life style" or enactment; or very generally, gender and antisemitism in academia). Some of the frictions, I contend, had already been present in German(y) but played out more obviously after the "Übersetzen" (of the words or of the Atlantic). – Since last spring, my colleague Prof. Francesco de Angelis at Columbia University and I have been conducting a Margarete Bieber reading group in which we look at exactly these questions (and I'll be happy to share our findings). So far, we have been studying Bieber's work on ancient theater and Greek dress. Next term we'll be focusing on her seminal book on Roman copies (of Greek art).

// Prof. Annetta Alexandridis (Cornell University, Ithaca)