Assistant Professor of Classics Jesse Weiner recently presented invited talks in Canada and Germany.
At Western University in London, Ontario, Weiner discussed “Monuments, Memory, and Civil War: Two Case Studies from Imperial Rome and the Former Yugoslavia.”
He analyzed the ways Roman epic poet Lucan presents monuments as volatile sites where collective memories are formed, reshaped, and unmade, and where national identities and competing versions of histories are put into conflict with one another. In discussing these dynamics between material culture, history, memory, and politics, Weiner drew upon a set of 20th century Balkan monuments and their afterlives as comparison.
Weiner presented “Vida, muerte y biopolítica en Antígona; las voces que incendian el desierto de Perla de la Rosa” (“Life, Death, and Biopolitics in Perla de la Rosa’s Antígona; las voces que incendian el desierto”) at Romanistentag. At the event, which took place at Germany’s University of Kassel, Weiner discussed a 2004 rewriting of Sophocles’ Antigone that addressed serial violence against women in Juárez, Mexico. He used Giorgio Agamben’s biopolitics to analyze the ways Perla de la Rosa’s play drew upon and amplified the Antigone tradition’s motif of symbolic death to frame feminicide as shared trauma.
