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The Biggs Family Residency in Classics

‘Suffering is not seldom the reward for service …’: Anna Julia Cooper and the Black Feminist Prometheus

Emily Greenwood, James M. Rothenberg Professor of the Classics and of Comparative Literature, Harvard University

Co-sponsored by the Department of African and African American Studies

black and white phot of Anna Julia Cooper, a black woman sitting in a victorian dress
Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964) is celebrated and studied as a writer, educational leader, teacher, and feminist theorist who belonged to a starry generation of Black classicists that included Mary Church Terrell, W.E.B. Du Bois, Fanny Jackson Coppin, and William Sanders Scarborough. In 1925, at a ceremony celebrating her Ph.D. in History from the Sorbonne, Cooper compared the struggles and sacrifices of her educational career to those of Prometheus. This lecture will examine Cooper’s use of Prometheus as a complex figure of intellectual embodiment, relating it to Cooper’s broader interest in the torch relay of the Black women educator and wider patterns in her classical signifying.


[While Cooper spent most of her career in Washington D.C., there is a Missouri connection: Cooper was briefly Professor of Greek and Latin at Lincoln Institute (now Lincoln University) in Jefferson City between 1906 and 1910.]