Written Arts Program and Classical Studies Program Present

A Talk with Gwenda-lin Grewal

On Tuesday, October 18 at 6 pm in Weis Cinema, Gwenda-lin Grewal will give a talk on her book Fashion / Sense.

Fashion / Sense seeks to explode fashion, and with it, the stigma in philosophy against fashion’s superficiality. Using primarily ancient Greek texts, alongside allusions to fashion and pop culture, Grewal examines the rift between fashion and philosophy, and challenges the claim that fashion is modern. Fashion’s quarrel with philosophy may be as ancient as that infamous quarrel between philosophy and poetry. And the quest for fashion’s origins—for a neutrally-outfitted self, stripped of the self-awareness that comes with thinking—prompts deeper questions about human agency and time. In the silhouettes of clothes and words, fashion emerges as perhaps philosophy’s most underestimated doppelgänger.

Introduced by writer and Bard College faculty member Benjamin Hale, and followed by a Q&A.

Gwenda-lin Grewal is currently the Onassis Lecturer in Ancient Greek Thought and Language at the New School for Social Research. She is the author of Fashion | Sense: On Philosophy and Fashion (Bloomsbury, 2022), Thinking of Death in Plato’s Euthydemus: A Close Reading and New Translation (Oxford University Press, 2022), an edited volume of essays on “(Mis)quotations in Plato” (Center for Hellenic Studies, 2022), and English translations of Plato’s Phaedo (Center for Hellenic Studies, 2018) and Plato’s Cratylus (New Alexandria, forthcoming). Her awards include the Blegen Research Fellowship (Vassar College) and an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship (Yale University).

Benjamin Hale is the author of the novel The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (Twelve, 2011) and the collection The Fat Artist and Other Stories (Simon & Schuster, 2016).  He has received the Bard Fiction Prize, a Michener-Copernicus Award, and nominations for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award. His writing has appeared, among other places, in Conjunctions, Harper's Magazine, the Paris Review, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and has been anthologized in Best American Science and Nature Writing.

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For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail [email protected].

Time: 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: Campus Center, Weis Cinema

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