Sappho: A Day of Learning

Everyone knows Sappho, and no one knows Sappho: one of the most brilliant and notorious poets of the ancient world, she has been everything from the most sublime of literary models to a doomed lover to an icon of lesbian desire to a collection of fragments to a figure for lyric poetry itself. Who was Sappho? And what is lyric poetry? This event—a critical exploration of Sappho’s oeuvre, translation, and reception— attempts to answer those questions from the perspectives of Classical, historical, literary, and queer studies. Sappho conjures female bodies and pleasures, challenges the Homeric tradition of poetry that preceded her, as well as the metaphysics of essence that would follow. In her writing, we find evocations of ideas, worlds, desires, and sexualities otherwise absent from our accounts of Greek antiquity. The poetry of Sappho confounds us with its lacunae, both material and critical: the fragments that have been transmitted to us are heart-breakingly partial and often misconstrued by a conservative tradition of textual scholarship and commentary. The most fundamental questions of Sappho’s historical circumstances remain unsettled: To whom did Sappho sing and on what occasions, to what pedagogic or celebratory ends? How can we understand Sappho’s sexuality, whether in terms of our (scanty) knowledge of ancient practice or in light of contemporary theories? How do we read the fragments of a poet who has been so disfigured, so romanticized, so empowering, so much an object of our own eros?

The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research's Afternoon of Learning will offer a series of short talks by scholars from the Brooklyn Institute (including Rebecca Ariel Porte on Sappho and lyric poetry, Erin Petrella on Sappho’s exile and textual authenticity, Hannah Leffingwell on Sappho and the formation of a modern lesbian sensibility, and Bruce King on Sappho and education), small-group reading, and discussion of Sappho’s poetry. For Greek readers, there will be opportunities to read Sappho’s poems in the “original,” with guidance from scholars. Our afternoon will conclude with a reading featuring the poet Jameson Fitzpatrick—and special cocktails for the occasion.

Join us for an intensive and collective encounter with Sappho’s poetry, in all its complexity, its beauty, and its glimpses of paths not taken …

Provisional Schedule

1:00: Welcome

1:00 – 1:40: Remarks from Rebecca Ariel Porte and Erin Petrella

1:45 – 2:45: Reading and discussion groups [one for readers in translation, one for Greek readers]

2:45 – 3:00: Break

3:00 – 3:40: Remarks from Bruce King and Hannah Leffingwell

3:45 – 4:45: Reading and discussion groups

4:45: Cocktails

5:00 – 5:20: Full group discussion

5:30 – 6:00: Poetry reading by Jameson Fitzpatrick

Participants

• Bruce King

  Bruce M. King’s teaching and research focuses on the ancient Greek and Roman world. He is especially engaged by anthropological, psychoanalytic, queer, comparative, and materialist approaches to the ancient world. He has published articles on Homer, the pre-Socratics, Sophocles, and Plato, as well as on reception history. Bruce has a PhD in Classics from the University of Chicago.

• Rebecca Ariel Porte

  Rebecca Ariel Porte is a member of the Core Faculty specializing in literature and aesthetic philosophy and theory. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and her scholarly interests include comparative poetry and poetics, critical theory, and dream houses of the collective (paradise, Arcadia, the Golden Age, utopia, and the given world).

• Hannah Leffingwell

  Hannah Leffingwell is a writer, historian, and educator specializing in queer and gender history, lesbian culture, and contemporary LGBTQ+ and feminist social movements. Her research situates twentieth-century lesbian history in transnational and intersectional contexts, asking how experiments in queer and feminist world-making have driven movements for social change across national borders. She holds a PhD in History and French Studies from New York University, where she taught courses on modern queer history, gender history, political revolutions, modern Europe, Russian history, and the history of ideas.

• Erin Petrella

  Erin Petrella received her PhD in Classics from Columbia University. Her research focuses on the history and development of botanical Latin, the scientific ideal of universal intelligibility, and textual authenticity. She has a prior MLS in Rare Books Librarianship and has worked for several years with Columbia’s Justice-in-Education program.

• Jameson Fitzpatrick

  Jameson Fitzpatrick is the author of the poetry collection Pricks in the Tapestry (Birds, LLC, 2020) and three chapbooks, including most recently Duet for Marschallin Voice & Sappho Voice (Belladonna* Collaborative, 2024). The recipient of a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature, she is a clinical associate professor at New York University, where she teaches first-year writing.