The Athena Series: Why Rome Matters
Join the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Study of Core Texts and Ideas and the School of Civic Leadership for the inaugural event in The Athena Series, a collaborative lecture series in honor of the new major in Great Books. From the orators of the Roman republic to the poets and historians of the empire, Rome has captured the imagination of both scholars and the public alike for generations. In a conversation moderated by Dr. Max Lykins (SCL), Drs. Hugh Liebert (West Point) and Nathaniel Gilmore (University of Texas) will discuss the intellectual legacy of ancient Rome and what lessons Rome has for the present day.
Hugh Liebert is a professor of political science, director of the Dawkins Scholars Program, and founding co-director of the American Foundations minor at the United States Military Academy West Point (USMA). A graduate of Harvard University (bachelor’s degree) and the University of Chicago (doctorate), Liebert is the author or editor of seven books, including Plutarch’s Politics (2016), which won the Delba Winthrop Award for Excellence in Political Science, and Gibbon’s Christianity (2022). A specialist in the history of political thought, he has also written widely on American politics and foreign policy.
Nathaniel Gilmore is an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas’s Department of Government. Dr. Gilmore writes on legal and historical political thought. He published his first book, Montesquieu and the Spirit of Rome (2022), at Oxford University’s Studies in the Enlightenment Series, and he has placed papers in the American Political Science Review, the European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, the History of European Ideas, the History of Political Thought, the Journal of the History of Ideas, and the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the Political Culture of the Roman Republic.
Max Lykins is an Assistant Professor at the School of Civic Leadership. He is a political theorist whose interests include ancient political thought, especially the Romans, republicanism and the republican tradition, and rhetoric and political theory. His work has been published or is forthcoming in the Journal of the History of Ideas, Polis, and Political Research Quarterly. Previously, he was visiting assistant professor at Bowdoin College and postdoctoral fellow in the Program on Constitutionalism and Democracy at the University of Virginia.
