THE DOUGLAS CHALMERS GRADUATE SCHOLARS LECTURESHIPS

The inaugural Douglas Chalmers Graduate Scholars Lectureships will be held at EPIC’s office in 202A Philosophy Hall. Professor Emeritus Daniel Thys curates the Graduate Scholars scholarship program, which is fully funded by EPIC member donations.

Even today, the general public is hardly as familiar with Octavia Minor—emperor Augustus’ sister—as with, say, Cleopatra VII, that famous Ptolemaiac queen and Antony’s lover. Livia, Augustus’ influential spouse, has also consistently received closer scrutiny in the scholarship of the last century. Yet, in parallel with these notorious figures ran the life of Octavia Minor, Augustus’ elder and only full sister. Lien Van Geel’s lecture focuses on Octavia’s presence in Plutarch’s Life of Antony. She demonstrates how this literary depiction forms another parallel life with that of Cleopatra in the work as a whole. The Plutarchan Octavia is especially conspicuous when juxtaposed with the versions that Appian and Cassius Dio have handed down to us. One merely needs to look at the three authors’ depictions of the Treaty of Brundisium and the Treaty of Tarentum to see the different existing Octavias. Van Geel ties the focus of her talk to her current book project on Plutarchan female characters in the age of Caesar and how their literary presentations reside in the cultural imagination. 

Lien Van Geel received her PhD in Classics at Columbia University in June 2022 after she defended her dissertation titled “Soror Augusti: Octavia Minor’s lives and afterlives,” in which she examined the different and changing roles, narratives, and representations of Octavia during the triumviral period and beyond. During the 2022–2023 academic year, she teaches and conducts postdoctoral research as an Early Career Fellow in Classics.

This presentation examines the gendered politics of grievability for Black women victims of state-sanctioned and interpersonal violence. Brendane Tynes examines the ways Black women and girls experience gendered violence after death, particularly how their lives are undone and redone to configure imaginations of womanhood, motherhood, and femininity. She discusses her definition of “imagined (after)life”: the imagined condition of the lives of those killed by state-sanctioned and interpersonal violence, whose “untimely,” violent deaths open up the space for projected desires. Building upon the work of Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Selamawit Terrefe, Joy James, and other critical Black feminist scholars, Brendane asks: Under what conditions are Black women and girls—trans, cis, and gender-free—grievable victims of violence in and beyond Black communities? How are these conditions drawn from sociohistorical constructions of Black femininity? What could a radical reimagination of their (after)lives look like? To answer these questions, Brendane analyzes the symbolic-material figure of the Black maternal, locating her in ethnographic data and through the reimagination of Breonna Taylor’s and Korryn Gaines’s (after)lives. She ends with a call for a radical reimagination of the (after)lives of Black women and girls that remains with the fleshiness of their being, a politics of care that does not reinscribe anti-black, patriarchal violence onto the living or the dead.

Brendane A. Tynes (she/her) is a Black queer feminist scholar and storyteller from Columbia, South Carolina. She is an Anthropology PhD candidate who studies the affective responses of Black women and girls to multiple forms of violence within the Movement for Black Lives. Her research interests include Black feminist anthropology, Black feminist critical theory, gendered violence, Black political movements, memory, and affect studies.