Oakcrest School will host its seventh-annual O’Donovan Humanities Lecture on March 12 at 7 p.m., featuring father-daughter scholars Victor Lee Austin and Emily Austin speaking on “Ancient and Modern Grief: Presence and Absence.”
The pair’s lecture will look at grief from two angles. Emily Austin, a classics professor at the University of Chicago, will discuss an ancient story of grief and anger from Homer’s “The Iliad.” Victor Lee Austin, theologian-in-residence for the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas, will ponder the loss of his wife at the end of a struggle with brain disease.
The O’Donovan Humanities Lecture is an annual event featuring scholars and artists from around the country which aims to instill a deeper appreciation of the importance of the humanities in everyday life.
The lecture is named in honor of the first headmistress of Oakcrest, Pat O’Donovan, who opened the school in 1976 with 22 girls in Washington, D.C.
Past speakers have included Harvard faculty member and former American Enterprise Institute president Arthur Brooks, Wyoming Catholic College president Glenn Arbery and Evelyn Birge Vitz, professor emerita of French literature, thought and culture at New York University.
The event is free and open to the public. To learn more and RSVP, visit oakcrest.org/academics/odonovan-humanities-lecture.