Victoria Wohl
Professor of Classics, University of Toronto
Fall 2023 Sather Lectures
The Poetry of Being and the Prose of the World in Early Greek Philosophy
| September 21 Lecture One: The Poetry of Being Maude Fife Room, 315 Wheeler Hall, 7 PM | September 28 Lecture Two: Parmenides' Logos of Being 370 Dwinelle Hall, 5:30 PM |
| October 5 Lecture Three: Time, the Cosmos, and the Soul in Heraclitus 370 Dwinelle Hall, 5:30 PM | October 12 Lecture Four: Autobiography of a Daimōn: Empedocles’ Radical Materialism 370 Dwinelle Hall, 5:30 PM |
| October 19 Lecture Five: Paratactic Politics: Anaxagoras and the Things 370 Dwinelle Hall, 5:30 PM | October 26 Lecture Six: Democritus and the Poetics of Nothing 370 Dwinelle Hall, 5:30 PM |
More about Victoria Wohl
After earning her PhD in Classics from UC Berkeley in 1994, Wohl taught at the University of Texas at San Antonio and at the Ohio State University, before moving to the Department of Classics at the University of Toronto in 2006, where she is currently Professor and department chair. Her list of honors and positions includes the Martin Classical Lectures at Oberlin (2011), the Webster Fellowship of the Institute for Classical Studies in London (2013), the Faber Lecture of Princeton (2015), and the Housman Lecture of University College, London (2019). She has served as co-editor of the premier classical studies journal of Canada (Phoenix) and as the speaker for the Classical Association of Canada Western (2011) and Central (2014) Regional Lecture Tours.
Professor Wohl is a world-renowned expert on the literature and culture of ancient Greece. For more than a quarter of a century, she has stood at the cutting edge of both the application of literary and critical theory to the interpretation of ancient Greek literature and a revolution in our understanding of the historical situatedness of Greek literature within Greek social institutions and practices. She has written extensively and influentially on prose and verse literature alike, on tragedy and oratory, on philosophy and epic, on historiography and lyric; the range of genres and modes of discourse addressed in her publications is remarkable. In addition to many articles and chapters, Wohl is the author of four monographs: Intimate Commerce: Exchange, Gender, and Subjectivity in Greek Tragedy (Texas, 1998), Love Among the Ruins: The Erotics of Democracy in Classical Athens (Princeton, 2002), and Law’s Cosmos: Juridical Discourse in Athenian Forensic Oratory (Cambridge, 2010), and Euripides and the Politics of Form (Princeton, 2015); she is also the editor of the collection Probabilities, Hypotheticals, and Counterfactuals in Ancient Greek Thought (Cambridge, 2014). Her most recent work centers on the poetics of the Presocratic philosophers.
