Prof. Shane Butler delivers “Ghost Machines” lecture in Berlin

Prof. Shane Butler delivers “Ghost Machines” lecture in Berlin

On May 18, Shane Butler, Chair of Classics and Nancy H. and Robert E. Hall Professor in the Humanities, delivered a lecture entitled “Ghost Machines” at the Freie Universität in Berlin, at the Collaborative Research Center “Episteme in Motion.” In the lecture, Prof. Butler reveals that the over-the-top lessons on Latin poetry by a Jesuit teacher in Rome in the early 1600s partly predicted the much later inventions of the telegraph and phonograph and may even have contributed to Isaac Newton’s theories of mechanics. Listen to the lecture.