On 12.12.2023, William M. Barton gave a lecture as part of the Comparative Literature Department’s (UIBK) lecture series, »Positionen der Literaturwissenschaft«, entitled “Literature and Education as a Political Act: Karl B. Hase’s Cultural Philhellenism in 19th-century Paris”.

William provided students with an overview of the social-political history of Greece in the late eighteenth-century before diving into the role of western European ideas about the country and its history. On the basis of Hase’s engagement with Greek intellectuals working in France and Germany in the years during and surrounding the Greek War of Independence, the lecture but flesh on the bones of the idea of ‘cultural philhellenism’, formulated in Maufroy’s work.

The lecture attracted questions on the ‘literary’ nature of Ancient Greek translations of scholarly and political works in the 19th century, as well as on the polarising nature of much historical philhellenic discourse.