Lincoln Scholars Annual Lecture

Homer’s Odyssey has long been recognized as the West’s preeminent foundational text about voyages of discovery, serving as a template for works as varied as Dante’s Inferno and television’s Star Trek. For during his decade-long return home from the Trojan War, its hero, Odysseus, encounters strange (and sometimes monstrous) life forms and different kinds of civilizations, both more advanced and more primitive than his own, each of which forces him to assess the nature of the home to which he so fiercely yearns to return. But by the time he does return home, his harrowing privations and experiences as a captive and beggar seem to have left an indelible mark. In this lecture, Daniel Mendelsohn examines the Odyssey’s ancient voyages and the ways in which they can illumine urgent issues of the present day: migration, refugees, citizenship, and what it means to map one’s identity, both personal and political, in a world of shifting borders.