What Are the Origins of Western Culture?

All are invited to join Zephyr for this evening salon with Dan Edelstein (Stanford, French) on the origins of Western culture.

What was the role of geography in shaping Western culture? Is the qualifier “Western“ simply a recent way to designate a cultural tradition that originated with Hellenism? Or did the location of the Greeks “to the west of” the Persian empire play a role in their self-identity and cultural production? This lecture will explore both how geography as well as peripherality contributed to the formation of Western culture in the fifth and fourth centuries BC. 

About the Speaker

Dan Edelstein is William H. Bonsall Professor of French and, by courtesy, professor of political science and history at Stanford University. He is also a senior fellow by courtesy at the Hoover Institution. As the Nehal and Jenny Fan Raj COLLEGE director, he directs Stanford’s first-year general education requirement. He codirects the Stanford Civics Initiative and is the faculty codirector for the ePluribus Stanford initiative. He studied at the University of Geneva (BA) and the University of Pennsylvania (PhD). He is the author or editor of eleven books on European intellectual and political history, including most recently The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin (Princeton, 2025). He is currently working on a history of Western culture.