Zoë Kontes is associate professor and chair of classics at Kenyon College, where her research and award-winning teaching focus on classical archaeology and issues of cultural property. In 2015 she wrote a New York Times op-ed on the repatriation of antiquities, and in 2016-17 Kontes received a Whiting Public Engagement Fellowship to produce Looted, a narrative podcast series on the illicit trade in antiquities, which also draws on her experience as a college radio DJ.
Listen to Looted at www.lootedpodcast.org.
This year's topic for the Sidore Lecture Series is "Who Owns the Past?" While human lives are at risk every day, so too is the cultural heritage created by past cultures and societies, ones that are important not only for scholarly interest but also for the identity of present cultures. Some questions speakers will address over the year are 'Why do we—and should we—care about ancient monuments and culture when confronted with similarly urgent problems with what might be called ‘real-life’ consequences? And if we decide that the past is worth preserving, who has the right and responsibility to take on these challenges, and how can such preservation be effectively accomplished? The series will focus on cultural preservation and its challenges in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.
The Saul O Sidore Memorial Lecture Series was established in 1965 in memory of Saul O Sidore of Manchester, New Hampshire. The purpose of the series is to offer the University community and the state of New Hampshire programs that raise critical and sometimes controversial issues facing our society. The University of New Hampshire Center for the Humanities sponsors the programs. "W_Cs";"C_E_Ds"