Richard J. A. Talbert to Give 2009 E. M. Adams Lecture in the Humanities and Human Values

4:00 p.m. Sunday, October 18, 2009 UNC-Chapel Hill School of Social Work Auditorium

Richard J. A. Talbert of the Department of History at UNC Chapel Hill will give the 2009 E. Maynard Adams Lecture in the Humanities and Human Values at 4:00 p.m. on Sunday, October 18, 2009, in the auditorium of the School of Social Work on the UNC campus. Professor Talbert’s topic will be “Rome and the Power of Creative Cartography, AD 300-1500.”

The Adams Lecture is free of charge and open to the public. Parking is available in the Nash parking lot (click here for a map). After the lecture, there will be a reception and dinner at the Carolina Inn in honor of Professor Talbert. Please call the Humanities Program at 919-962-1544 to register for the dinner.

Uniquely among ancient peoples, Romans came to realize that maps are not merely factual records, but also value-laden documents.  Then, as now, they could even be designed to promote and reinforce values, however unappealing we may find several Roman choices: unashamed arrogance, pride in conquest, entitlement to world-rule.  Overall in recent decades scholars have gradually developed more sensitive and satisfying approaches to interpreting the cartographic products of pre-modern societies.  As yet, however, there has been no such reappraisal for the various forms of Roman mapping.  Richard Talbert has now completed one, and his Adams Lecture shares some key findings.  In particular, he exposes powerful meaning and purpose in the single great Roman world-map that survives (in Vienna, Austria), and he constructs a compelling fresh context for it.  He also proceeds to identify the creation of this underappreciated masterpiece as a pivotal moment in western cartography, an inspirational awakening with a longterm cultural impact that would influence Christian mapmaking through to the Renaissance. 

Richard Talbert is from England, and studied Classics at Cambridge University, before becoming lecturer in ancient history at Queen’s University, Belfast, in Northern Ireland (1970).  He next moved (1985) to teach in Canada at McMaster University, and to chair its History Dept.  He moved again (in 1988) to take up his present position as W.R. Kenan Professor of History at UNC.  As visiting professor, he has taught at the universities of Alabama and Princeton.  He has gained Guggenheim and other fellowships and awards, as well as securing extensive funding support for his work.  He is past President of the Association of Ancient Historians.  His historical interests within antiquity are broad and varied, ranging from Spartans and western Greeks to government and society in the Roman empire, and above all in recent years mapping, travel and worldview.  The establishment of UNC’s unique Ancient World Mapping Center followed his publication of the pathbreaking Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World (2000).  Much of his latest major study Rome’s World: the Peutinger Map Reconsidered is a digital presentation forthcoming from Cambridge University Press early next year.  Also due to appear shortly is Geography, Ethnography, and Perspectives of the World in Pre-Modern Societies (Wiley/Blackwell, co-edited with Kurt Raaflaub). 

The Adams Lecture is named for E. M. Adams, who was Kenan Professor of Philosophy at UNC Chapel Hill. Professor Adams (1919-2003) played a key role in the creation of the UNC Humanities Program and was an eloquent spokesman for the role of the humanities and human values in contemporary education and culture.