A Roundtable Discussion of Professor Todd Reeser’s Setting Plato Straight: Translating Ancient Sexuality in the Renaissance chaired by Dr. Anthony Hooper (Classics) with remarks by Professor Reeser and responses from Professor Jennifer Ingleheart (Classics), Dr. Andrea Capra (Classics) and Dr. Marc Schachter (MLAC).

Thursday, June 7th from 16:30-18:00 in the Ritson Room, Department of Classics, 38 North Bailey

Professor Reeser will also present a talk entitled “Affect Theory and Masculinity Studies” on Friday, June 8th at 17:30 in Seminar Room 1, History Department, 43 North Bailey.

Todd Reeser is Professor of French and Program Director of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. In Setting Plato Straight, Professor Reeser undertakes the first sustained and comprehensive study of Renaissance textual responses to Platonic same-sex sexuality. Reeser mines an expansive collection of translations, commentaries, and literary sources to study how Renaissance translators transformed ancient eros into non-erotic, non-homosexual relations. He analyzes the interpretive lenses translators employed and the ways in which they read and reread Plato’s texts. In spite of this cleansing, Reeser finds surviving traces of Platonic same-sex sexuality that imply a complicated, recurring process of course-correction—of setting Plato straight.