Join us at the Ioannou Centre in Oxford on Thursday 5 March 2026 at 5pm for the George Cawkwell Memorial Lecture, to be given by Professor Lynette Mitchell, Professor in Greek History and Politics at the University of Exeter and a former British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow and Junior Research Fellow at Oriel College, Oxford. The lecture is held in memory of George Cawkwell (1919-2019), a beloved figure at University College, Oxford and a true giant in the field of Ancient History.
Lecture Abstract:
Mark Twain, in the Acknowledgements to his 1907 novella, A Horse’s Tale, says: ‘Along through the book I have distributed a few anachronisms and unborn historical incidents and such things, so as to help the tale over the difficult places. This idea is not original with me; I got it out of Herodotus. Herodotus says, ‘Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all: the conscientious historian will correct these defects’.
George Cawkwell was much taken with this anecdote and cited it more than once in his public papers. George himself, as an ancient historian, was committed to reading ‘against the grain’, and so to being himself, in some degree, a ‘conscientious historian’. This lecture will explore further what it means to be a ‘conscientious historian’ of the ancient world, both for George Cawkwell and in the 21st century.
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Biography: Lynette Mitchell
Professor Lynette Mitchell began her undergraduate career at the University of New England in northern New South Wales before coming to the UK. She subsequently held a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellowship and Junior Research Fellowship at Oriel College, Oxford, before moving to the University of Exeter in 1998, where she is now a Professor in Greek History and Politics.
Primarily a Greek historian, Professor Mitchell works on Greek political history from the archaic period (8th century BC) to the death of Alexander. She also has interest in later periods, especially the Hellenistic; Greek language and historiography; and the history of the ancient Near East. Her current areas of interest focus on the development of Greek political thought, especially in the relation to monarchy, and ancient monarchy more generally.
