By Leyli Izadpanah and Rocket Belden
Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, a day where people come together to celebrate love. But what is love exactly? What kinds of love exist, and how have humans thought about love in the past?
Founder of the award-winning, student-organized Gnosis club and a PhD in English, Dr. Annie Gray will discuss the answers to these questions and more in her upcoming lecture, “Love and Its Meaning in the World: An Unsentimental Journey” next Wednesday, February 12th.
Gray’s lecture is part of the Faculty Lecture series on campus, another program at Pellissippi State Community College that she had a hand in creating. Both Gnosis and the lecture series were born out of love and community, each taking part in building her interest in the topic of love throughout her career.
In a recent interview, Gray said she has been looking forward to this lecture for about a year now. Although the topic of love doesn’t come up often in academic contexts, Gray believes it’s “a topic that resonates with everybody.”
She plans to take the audience through a “cultural, mythological, and psychoanalytical tour of how humans have regarded love through the ages.”
Starting with the ancient Greeks and Egyptians, she will guide attendees through the earliest recorded mythologies about love all the way to the present, with a focus on how the last two centuries have shaped the concept of modern love.
Gray also hints towards her discussion on the emotional ups and downs that come with love in the subtitle “An Unsentimental Journey”; she states there isn’t “anything you put your love into that you don’t experience loss… it’s not all puppy dog tails wagging. Love has taken a dark turn.”
Despite its dark side, Gray says she believes love can solve many problems in today’ s society that stem from its lack, such as “the tendency to give oneself away.”
“Love is a mystery,” Gray said with a chuckle, adding that those who come to her lecture can begin to unravel it.
