(New Orleans)—Loyola University’s Biever Guest Lecture Series announces a lecture by Eleanor Winsor Leach, Ph.D., “Spearing Boars with a Stylus: Younger Pliny Writes High-status Holidays” on Thursday, October 17, 2002, in the Nunemaker Auditorium, from 8 to 10 p.m. Leach will discuss how ancient Romans spent their leisure time, away from the city, writing poetry and hunting. She’ll talk about their county homes and villas where Romans went to escape their busy lives in the city, filled with politics and commerce. She approaches her writing and lecturing with an interdisciplinary approach that enlists insights from Roman literature, material culture and social history.

Leach is the Ruth N. Halls Professor of Classical Studies and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, where she has served as department chair and is currently director of graduate studies. Leach received a bachelor’s degree and doctorate from Bryn Mawr College and Yale University respectively.

Leach has frequently pursued her research on Roman art in Rome and Campania, especially at the Vesuvian site of Pompeii and has twice directed National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminars for College Teachers in Rome. Leach has written Vergil’s Eclogues: Landscapes of Experience, a study of pastoral poetry with reference to the ideology of the Roman agricultural countryside and The Rhetoric of Space: Visual and Literary Representation of Landscape in Republican Augustan Rome, a discussion of spatial depiction as a mode of reconstructing visual imagination and the experience of viewing. Her upcoming book is Roman Painting and Society.

For more information about this event, contact T. Davina McClain, Associate Professor, Classical Studies, 865-3683 or mcclain@loyno.edu.