Registration is required for this hybrid event. You can register for all Fall 2021 tgiFHI talks using this link. Please note that in-person attendance is limited to current Duke faculty, students, and staff.

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Please join the Franklin Humanities Institute for its Friday morning series, tgiFHI! tgiFHI gives Duke faculty in the humanities, interpretative social sciences and arts the opportunity to present their current research to their departmental (and interdepartmental) colleagues, students, and other interlocutors in their fields.

Talk description:

Trauma is a Greek word, but how we talk about trauma today is not how the ancient Greeks understood it. Ancient Greek writers used the word trauma to refer to physical wounds, not psychological ones. Yet they also used a diverse array of terms to describe emotional pain for which there are no precise equivalents in English. Hopping from Greek tragedy to ancient Greek medical writing to historiography, this talk asks if the ancient Greeks had a concept of psychological trauma and examines how that concept might intersect with our own.

Speaker bio

Erika L. Weiberg is Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Classical Studies and Theater Studies at Duke University. She is currently completing a book manuscript for Oxford University Press on women’s trauma in Greek homecoming plays, titled Seeing Women’s Wounds: Trauma and Homecoming in Greek Tragedy. They have also published numerous articles and chapters on Greek tragedy, Ovid, and Anne Carson. 

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