Professor Amy Smith gives prestigious Trendall Lecture

C.W Götzloff, Antiquities by a Balcony Overlooking the Gulf of Naples, 1826

This term Professor Amy C. Smith is one of 18 international scholars (and 3 Classicists) selected as to be a Visiting Research Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University (ANU), in that nation’s capital, Canberra.This week, however, she has been invited to Melbourne to deliver the prestigious Trendall Lecture, at the A.D. Trendall Research Centre for Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Latrobe University. She will deliver her lecture, entitled ‘1766 and All That! Winckelmann and the Study of Greek Vases’, in the State Library of Victoria at 6:30 pm on Thursday, 16 November.

The Trendall Centre is named for Professor A.D. (Dale) Trendall (1909-1995), around whose library, archives & collections it is built. A classical historian and archaeologist, with particular expertise in the Greek art of South Italy, Prof. Trendall amassed perhaps the finest library of Classical Archaeology in the Southern hemisphere. After a long and distinguished career as Professor of Greek and Chair of Archaeology at University of Sydney, then Master of University House at ANU, in 1960 he retired to Latrobe University (in Melbourne), where he worked as Resident Fellow for many years, continuing his groundbreaking work on the attribution of tens of thousands of vases made by Greeks in South Italy, and maintaining warm working relationships with international scholars including Annie Ure, Curator of Classics@Reading’s Ure Collection until her death in 1976. Professor Smith is the Ure Museum’s current Curator.

The Trendall Lecture is one of two annual lectures honouring and named for this influential scholar. The second, sponsored by the Australian Academy of the Humanities, of which Trendall was a Foundation Fellow, is delivered in conjunction with the conference of the Australasian Society of Classical Studies.