First Biannual Rudolf Pfeiffer Lecture: "Bringing Back Callimachus: The Epoch-Making Editorial Work of Rudolf Pfeiffer," featuring Annette Harder, an expert in Hellenistic poetry, on May 5 at 6:00 p.m. in Room M014 of the main building at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich.
Rudolf Pfeiffer (1889–1979) was a full professor of Classical Philology at LMU Munich from 1929 to 1937 and from 1951 to 1957. Because of his marriage to a Jewish woman, he was forcibly retired by the Nazi regime in 1937 and fled to Oxford, where he produced his monumental edition of Callimachus (Oxford 1949–1953). This edition, as well as his two-volume monograph on the history of Classical Philology (Oxford 1968 and 1976), are to this day regarded as standard works. In honor of this great Munich/Oxford philologist, it is planned to organize a Rudolf Pfeiffer Lecture every two years, with a thematic focus on one of the central themes of his research (Hellenistic poetry or the history of philology).
Annette Harder is Professor Emerita of Greek Philology at the University of Groningen. As the founder and organizer of the “Groningen Workshops on Hellenistic Poetry,” which have been held regularly since 1992, she has has made a significant contribution to modern research on Hellenistic poetry. Her two-volume commentary on the Aetia, which has survived only in fragments (Oxford 2012), is, alongside Pfeiffer’s edition, one of the most important publications in Callimachus research. It is a great honour for us that Annette Harder will be delivering the first Rudolf Pfeiffer Lecture.
