Award-winning historian, author and broadcaster Bettany Hughes will give this year’s Catharine Pellican Annual Memorial Lecture in Greek Culture at 7 p.m. March 3 in Century Room A in the Millennium Student Center at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. She will present, “Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore,” which is also the title of a book she wrote in 2005.

Hughes has made a number of documentaries for the BBC, Channel 4, PBS, Discovery, The History Channel and ABC for both the British and international markets, including “The Spartans,” “When the Moors Ruled in Europe,” “Athens: The Truth of Democracy,” “The Women of the Bible” and “Helen of Troy.” These have now been seen by more than 100 million people worldwide.

She is president of the Joint Association of Classical Teachers and advisor to the Foundation for Science Technology and Civilization. She has recently been awarded a special award for services to Hellenic Culture and Heritage and the Naomi Sargent Award for Broadcast Excellence. This year, she became chair of the Orange Prize for Fiction, one of the U.K.’s most prestigious literary prizes awarded to women.

Her latest book, “The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for The Good Life,”  has already been selected as a book of the year by the national press in the U.K. and was read on BBC Radio Four as the book of the week in the run up to Christmas. Hughes was a scholar at the University of Oxford in England and holds a research fellowship at King’s College in London.

The Catharine Pelican Annual Memorial Lecture in Greek Culture was established by Dr. and Mrs. George Pelican and Mrs. Maria P. Kafelenos in memory of their mother. The lecture is presented by the Hellenic Government-Karakas Family Foundation Professorship in Greek Studies of the Center for International Studies at UMSL.

More information:
cfis-umsl.com or 314-516-7299