Classics

Dr Donncha O'Rourke awarded Leverhulme Research Fellowship

The School was very pleased to hear that Dr Donncha O'Rourke has been awarded a one-year Leverhulme Research Fellowship.

HCA Dr Donncha O'Rourke
Dr Donncha O'Rourke

This one-year Leverhulme Research Fellowship will allow Dr O'Rourke to work on a project called 'Erring Willingly: Agency, akrasia and free will in Roman elegy' beginning  in September 2021 having been deferred for a year. 

Dr O'Rourke said, "I am thrilled to receive this award from the Leverhulme Trust. The funding will enable me to do the spadework on some challenging but far reaching philosophical texts composed in the late Roman republic, and to consider their reception by the Augustan poets of the following generation. The research will be aired first as the W.B. Stanford Memorial Lectures at Trinity College, Dublin, and will later be published by CUP in the volumes of that series.'

'Hating and loving simultaneously is just one of many instances in Roman elegiac poetry of a ‘weakness of will’ known in ancient ethics as akrasia. Erring Willingly holds that the elegists offer a philosophically inflected meditation on the degree to which the individual is in charge of their emotions, decisions and, ultimately, their destiny. The project examines how elegy accessed these questions, and sourced a language and imagery to discuss them, via Epicurean, Stoic and Academic Sceptic texts composed during the crises of sociopolitical liberty that accompanied Rome’s transition from Republic to Empire."

The School wishes to congratulate Dr O'Rourke on his award.