Story by Logan Jackson
The Mizzou Honors College will welcome celebrated translator and author Emily Wilson to campus for a public lecture on Friday, Sept. 19. Her lecture will begin at 4 p.m. in Bush Auditorium (Cornell Hall).
“We are thrilled to welcome Emily Wilson back to the Mizzou campus,” said Honors College Dean Catherine Rymph. “She has done incredible work through her translations and is a dynamic speaker. We are very fortunate to have her share more about her work and interact with our students.”
Wilson visited the Mizzou campus in 2019 to discuss her translation of the Odyssey.
Wilson is a British American classicist, author and translator. She is department chair and professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, holding the College for Women Class of 1963 Term Professor in the Humanities. Wilson was named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance and Early Modern scholarship, a MacArthur Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow. In 2018, she became the first woman to publish an English translation of Homer’s Odyssey. Her translation of the Iliad was released in September 2023.
Along with her public lecture, Wilson will interact with the Honors College in numerous ways. She will make classroom visits, including interacting with students in the Honors Humanities Sequence, who will be reading the Iliad this semester. She will also meet with students in the Department of Classics, Archaeology and Religion.
Wilson’s afternoon lecture is titled, “Translating the Violence of the Iliad.” The event is free and open to the public.