In partnership with King’s CHS and Classics Department and the Foundation for Platonic Studies.
We are pleased to announce the annual award ceremony and lecture for the Katie Lentakis Memorial Fund Award 2026. The Award is given annually by the League in memory of Katie Lentakis, for many years a stalwart of the London Greek community and a longstanding Vice-Chair of the League. The competition is open to final-year undergraduates at King’s College London for an essay on a Greek subject.
The ceremony will be an opportunity to applaud and meet the winner of the competition.
In addition, the Department of Classics at King’s College London will be awarding the fourth Mary Margaret McCabe Dissertation Prize in Ancient Philosophy.
The speaker wil be Professor Melissa Lane (Princeton University), whose presentation titled ‘Plato’s Republic on Motivating (Ecological) Guardianship’, draws on Plato’s Republic to explore how people can be educated so as to truly care about what it is right to do, bringing this perspective to bear on the challenges of ecology.
Booking details will follow soon.
Abstract: In Eco-Republic (published in the UK in 2011 and in the US in 2012), I drew on Plato’s Republic as a template for the kind of virtue ethics and politics that an environmentally sustainable society would require. On Plato’s view, people who truly know what it is right to do – in this case, what sustainability demands – would thereby be motivated to pursue it. But as environmental crises deepen, the gap between knowledge and motivation seems only to widen. In this talk, I return to the Republic to explore how Plato envisions that people can be educated so as to truly care about what it is right to do, bringing this perspective to bear on the challenges of ecology.
About the speaker: Melissa Lane is the Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton University, where she is also Associated Faculty in Classics and in Philosophy, and has received the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize, the Stanley J. Kelley Teaching Award of the Department of Politics, and the Faculty Community Engagement Award of the Pace Center for Civic Engagement. She currently also holds a three-year appointment dedicated to delivering periodic public lectures in London as the fiftieth Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College. She has held a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of Classics, as well as fellowships and visiting professorships at a number of institutions including the ANU, Auckland, Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, the American Academy in Rome, and the École Normale Supérieure. Professor Lane was educated in Californian public schools, then at Harvard University (graduating summa cum laude and being named a Truman Scholar and Marshall Scholar), and then at the University of Cambridge, where she received an MPhil and PhD in Philosophy and then taught for fifteen years before moving to Princeton in 2009. Her most recent monograph, titled Of Rule and Office: Plato’s Ideas of the Political and published in 2023 by Princeton University Press, was awarded the 2024 Book Prize of the Journal of the History of Philosophy; her 2012 PUP monograph, Eco-Republic, continues to be widely discussed. The only person ever to have delivered both the Carlyle Lectures and the Isaiah Berlin Lectures at the University of Oxford, Professor Lane has appeared multiple times on ‘In Our Time’ on BBC Radio Four, and has been published in periodicals in the US, UK, Italy and Germany.