Pre/Early Modern Forum: Seth Estrin (UChicago)

The Pre/Early Modern Forum is delighted to announce the upcoming talk by Dr. Seth Estrin from the University of Chicago. The event will take place in person (Loria 250) and on Zoom (https://yale.zoom.us/j/98892017319) on April 10 at 4:00 pm EST.
Dr. Estrin’s talk is titled “Archaic Sculpture and Archaisms of Gender: Rethinking the ‘Brother and Sister Stele,’” an abstract of which is included below:
The study of Archaic Greek sculpture has long been shaped by an axiomatic yet rarely articulated belief: that differences between figures carved in stone reflect biological differences between male and female bodies. I confront and contest this framework by re-evaluating the “Brother and Sister Stele,” one of the most important surviving works of Archaic sculpture. Exposing previous misreadings of the monument’s imagery, I use it to model an alternative history of early Greek art, one that understands depicted bodies not as records of gender difference, but as precisely the kinds of cultural objects through which gender difference was imagined.
Dr. Seth Estrin is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago; as of July 2023, he will be Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. He specializes in the art and visual cultures of ancient Greece, with a focus on Archaic and Classical sculpture and particular interest in questions of subjectivity, emotion, and gender. He is the author of Grief Made Marble: Funerary Sculpture in Classical Athens, which will appear this fall with Yale University Press. He received his PhD in Classical Archaeology from the University of California Berkeley and is the recipient of fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.