Forum Antiquum Lecture - Prof. Caroline Vout (University of Cambridge)

Title: A Classicist’s Take on the 1924 Olympic Games

Abstract: This year the summer Olympics returned to Paris for the first time in a century. There, a hundred years ago, the classicism of the founder of the modern Olympics, Pierre de Coubertin, and classicism’s claims to a return to order after the atrocities of World War I came into conflict with futurism, cubism, photography, technology, fashion. What did this ‘conflict’ do to art, life, gender, body-image? Caroline Vout explores these issues of classical reception and response by introducing the major exhibition she has co-curated at Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum, on until 3 November. 

The speaker: Caroline Vout is Professor of Archaeology/Classics at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Christ’s College there. Furthermore, she is director of the Museum of Classical Archaeological of Cambridge University. In the last years, she has also been the Byvanck Professor of Classical Archaeology at Leiden University, a position from which she will retire during a symposium preceding this Forum antiquum lecture. Her books include studies on Antinous; The Hills of Rome; Seeing the Erotic in Greece and Rome; Visuality in Greek and Latin Epic and its Reception; and most recently “Exposed: the Greek and Roman Body”.