The UCSC Program in Classical Studies and the UCSC Department of History presents:
Victoria Wohl
Department of Classics, University of Toronto
Affective Leadership: Political Judgment and the Emotions in Democratic Athens
Tuesday, January 5 at 4 p.m.
Humanities 1, Room 210
Free and open to the public
Refreshments at 3:30 p.m. and reception to follow the lecture
This paper explores the role of the emotions in mobilizing public opinion in democratic Athens. It takes as its starting point Thucydides’ famous contention that Pericles governed the demos by controlling its emotions through his own rational intelligence (2.65.9). Focusing on a single test case – the controversial decision in 431 BCE to remove the Athenians from their land – I propose that political opinion is formulated and mobilized when objects become charged with affect. My paper examines this process in Thucydides and Aristophanes, and concludes that far from the antithesis of reason, emotion is the condition of possibility for its operation within democratic politics.
Victoria Wohl is professor of Classics at University of Toronto. She received her B.A. from Harvard University, her M. St. from Oxford University, and her M.A. and PhD. from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Euripides and the Politics of Form (Princeton, forthcoming), L! aw’s Cosmos: Juridical Discourse in Athenian Forensic Oratory (Cambridge, 2010), Love Among the Ruins: The Erotics of Democracy in Classical Athens (Princeton, 2002) and Intimate Commerce: Exchange, Gender, and Subjectivity in Greek Tragedy (Texas, 1998).
For more information on the lecture, please contact hedrick@ucsc.edu.
