Alexander at the End of the World: The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great

Focusing on the final years of Alexander the Great, this talk, by Professor Rachel Kousser, is not about a charismatic leader changing the course of empire and history. Instead, it is about how the empire changed him. It uses archaeological evidence—the concrete and vivid material traces of Alexander’s journey—to show what ancient writers obscure, omit, or consider unimportant. In doing so, it gives voice to those who remain voiceless when history is written only by the victors.

Rachel Kousser is a professor of ancient art and archaeology at Brooklyn College and the chair of the Classics Department at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her most recent work, The Afterlives of Greek Sculpture: Interaction, Transformation, Destruction, received an Archaeological Institute of America Publication Subvention Award and was shortlisted for the Runciman Book Award for a book on Greek history or culture. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Getty Research Institute, and the Center for the Advanced Study of the Visual Arts.