The Omaha-Lincoln Society of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), in partnership with Creighton University's Departments of Classics and Religious Studies and Anthropology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Joslyn Art Museum, continues its exceptional programming with another free public lecture.
"What did the Greeks & Romans ever do for us? Putting classical civilization in perspective" with Ian Morris, Ph.D., Jean and Rebecca Willard Professor of Classics, Stanford University
The history, politics, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome occupy a prominent place in the western imagination, and their influence has been cited as essential in shaping aspects of American life ranging from politics and the law to morality and ethics to architecture and art, and everything in between. This lecture reviews the evolution of our modern American relationship with classical civilization and questions whether we really owe as much as we think we do to the ancient Greeks and Romans.
IAN MORRIS is Jean and Rebecca Willard Professor of Classics and a Fellow of the Archaeology Center at Stanford University. He has directed excavations in Greece and Italy and has published fourteen books, including
Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History, and What they Reveal About the Future (2010),
The Measure of Civilization (2013), and
War! What is it Good For? (2014). His most recent book,
Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve, based on his
Tanner Lectures in Human Values at Princeton University, was published in 2015. His books have been translated into sixteen languages, have won several literary awards, and have been chosen as best books of the year by the
New York Times,
The Economist,
Foreign Affairs, the
Financial Times,
Newsweek,
Nature, and other outlets. He is currently writing a new book to be called
In the Beginning: What Happened in Ancient History.
Morris studied at Birmingham and Cambridge Universities in Britain before moving to the University of Chicago in 1987 and on to Stanford University in 1995. He has served at Stanford as Senior Associate Dean of Humanities and Sciences, Chair of the Classics department, and Director of the Archaeology Center and the Social Science History Institute. He has won several awards, including Guggenheim and Carnegie fellowships and a Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, and is currently a Fellow of the British Academy and a contributing editor at Stratfor, a strategic forecasting company.
Founded in 1879, the
Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) was chartered by the United States Congress in 1906, in recognition of its role in the development and passage of the Antiquities Act, which Theodore Roosevelt signed into law that year. Today, the AIA remains committed to preserving the world's archaeological resources and cultural heritage for the benefit of people in the present and in the future. The Lincoln-Omaha Society of the Archaeological Institute of America, chartered in 1995, provides the residents of Nebraska and western Iowa opportunities to attend lectures by prominent international, national, and local archaeologists.