Why Care About Flat Characters?: Katie Ebner-Landy in conversation with Marta Figlerowicz and Deidre Lynch

NOVEL THEORY

SPEAKERS: Katie Ebner-Landy, Utrecht University; Marta Figlerowicz, Yale University; Deidre Lynch, Harvard University

Please join us for a conversation about Professor Katie Ebner-Landy’s The Character Sketch as Philosophy: Manners, Mores, Types (Harvard University Press, 2024). In the fourth century BCE, the philosopher Theophrastus, a student of Aristotle, composed thirty character sketches depicting ordinary Athenian vices: idle chatter, bad timing, cowardice, shamelessness, and superstition, among others. Centuries later, this enigmatic text—known as the Characters—was feverishly translated and imitated by early modern Europeans convinced of its moral and political importance. Tracing this resurgence of the Theophrastan tradition, Katie Ebner-Landy sheds new light on the role of the character sketch as a philosophical tool. A revealing intellectual history, The Character Sketch as Philosophy also encourages us to consider what literary description might contribute to ethics and political thought today—and to think critically about the kinds of character sketches on which we still rely, from the snob to the mansplainer.

About the Speakers

Katie Ebner-Landy is an Assistant Professor of Aesthetics in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and a Junior Fellow at Harvard Society of Fellows. She completed her PhD in intellectual history at Queen Mary University of London. Her first book, The Character Sketch as Philosophy: Manners, Mores, Types, was recently published by Harvard University Press. Her academic articles have been published by venues including Renaissance Studies, Classical Quarterly, and Political Theory. She also writes publicly, and her essays have appeared in the Financial Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, and the New Yorker. 

Marta Figlerowicz is a Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale. A 2024 Guggenheim fellow, she is the author of Flat Protagonists (2016), Spaces of Feeling (2017), and the forthcoming It Must Be Possible: Modernity and Transcultural Knowledge, and the editor and translator of The Bad Child: A Maria Janion Reader (2025). Alongside her academic work, she regularly contributes to venues such as The Paris Review, The Drift, and Boston Review. 

Deidre Lynch is Ernest Bernbaum Professor of English Literature at Harvard and co-convenor (with Yoon Sun Lee) of the Novel Theory seminar at the Mahindra Humanities Center. Her prize-winning The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (1998) is sometimes credited with inaugurating the return to character in novel studies. 

If you have any questions, please contact Deidre Lynch at deidrelynch@fas.harvard.edu or Yoon Sun Lee at ylee@wellesley.edu.