Michèle Lowrie
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Classics and the College, University of Chicago

Dirk Ippen Fellow - Class of Spring 2016

Michèle Lowrie focuses on the intersection of ideology and literary form. Trained as a literary scholar at Harvard University, where she received her PhD in classical philology, she has turned increasingly to the subject of Roman politics and Latin literature. The author of Writing, Performance, and Authority in Augustan Rome (2009) and Horace’s Narrative Odes (1997), Lowrie’s current research concerns Roman political thought and its reception, including projects on exemplary thinking, civil war, and transformations in the public sphere.

 

Lowrie’s awards include a Burkhardt Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, as well as fellowships from the Center for Advanced Studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich and from the Research Center for Cultural Theory and Theory of the Political Imaginary at the Universität Konstanz. She is a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and has held a visiting research professorship at the Warburg-Haus in Hamburg.

Project Description

Safety, Security, and Salvation in Roman Political Thought

In her Academy project, Lowrie explored the Roman sources of concepts that are key to post-9/11 concerns about “national security” and “emergency.” The word “security,” derived from Latin, she notes, depends on a link between psychology and politics, tranquility of soul and tranquility of empire. Modern understanding often neglects the formative role of Roman political ideas, but Lowrie locates the beginnings of paradigms decisive for later conceptualization of security in the collapse of the Roman Republic and its aftermath. She analyzes paradoxes at the core of a set of tropes revolving around tranquility and anxiety, reciprocity and hierarchy, trade-off and sacrifice, embodiment and incarnation. In their evolution from antiquity to modernity, security discourses consistently touch on society’s most deeply held values.

Academy Activities

04 Feb 16

Fellow Spotlight: Michèle Lowrie

Michèle Lowrie focuses on the intersection of ideology and literary form. Trained as a literary scholar at Harvard University, where she received her PhD in classical philology, she has turned increasingly to the subject of Roman politics and Latin literature. The author of Writing, Performance, an ...

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09 Feb 16

Security, a Roman Metaphor

Security and secure borders preoccupy current public debates. But do we know what security means? Michèle Lowrie, Professor of Classics and the College, University of Chicago, notes that Securitas first occurs in Cicero meaning “tranquility,” in a strictly psychological sense. A century ...

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