Bard College Berlin Presents

The Poems of Enheduana - A Lecture by Sophus Helle

This hybrid lecture is part of the IS101 Republic Core course. Outside participants can attend online. 

Now celebrated as the first known author in literary history, Enheduana was a princess and priestess who lived more than four thousand years ago in what is now southern Iraq, about 2300 BCE. The poems attributed to her are hymns of great power, a rare flash of the female voice in the often male-dominated ancient world, treating themes that are as relevant today as they were four thousand years ago: exile, social disruption, the power of storytelling, the devastation of war, and the terrifying forces of nature. Sophus Helle, celebrated translator, writer, and cultural historian, will provide background on the historical context in which Enheduana’s poems were composed and circulated, the works’ literary structure and themes, and their reception in both the ancient and the modern world. Unjustly forgotten for millennia, Enheduana’s poems are essential reading for anyone interested in the literary history of women, religion, the environment, gender, authorship, and empire.

To receive the link for this event online please email Tracy Colony at [email protected].

Sophus Helle received his PhD in Comparative Literature from Aarhus University in 2020 and his MA in Assyriology from the University of Copenhagen in 2017. He was the winner of the European Young Researcher Award Popular Prize in 2020 and the Aarhus University Research Foundation PhD Prize in 2021. Since September 2021, he has been a postdoctoral fellow at Freie Universität Berlin with a stipend from the Carlsberg Foundation.

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For more information, e-mail [email protected].

Time: 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm CET/GMT+1

Location: Online

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