This research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust (2022-2026), asks how, where and why Aristotle has made cultural appearances in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales since the Restoration (1660). It focusses on the three areas of ethics, law and politics, rhetoric, and natural science. This ancient Greek intellectual titan’s authority has been omnipresent and vigorously contested. He has been both used to reinforce established authority and adopted by radicals and progressives. The Project PI is Edith Hall and the Research Fellows are Arlene Holmes-Henderson and Peter Swallow. Their findings are to be published in a monograph contracted to Routledge Taylor Francis; dates of the international conference: 26th-27th March 2025. For more details see the project website.
In 2023-4, Cypriot theatre writer and director, and classical scholar, Dr Magdalena Zira joined the department as visiting Fellow with the Institute of Advanced Study. Her project is a new play about Dido based on the ancient Phoenician and Carthaginian, rather than Virgil’s Aeneid. The play was workshopped with our undergraduates and culminated in a public performance.
As the climax of her fellowship, together with Edith Hall, Zira convened an international conference, The Afterlives of the Aeneid’s Women, with papers on the reception of Cassandra, Andromache, Lavinia, Amata, Silvia and Camilla as well as Dido, from medieval romances to 21st-century fiction and drama, many of them contributed by members of our department. The papers are currently being written up edited and will be published shortly as a collection of essays edited by Zira and Hall.
Our department’s research in this area, building on Edith Hall’s previous ARHC-funded projects Classics and Class in Britain and Ireland 1689-1939, consists of two parallel initiatives situated at the intersection of local history and Classical Reception studies.
Classical Presences in the North-East of England
This was our departmental research theme 2022—2023, culminating in an interdisciplinary conference convened b Edmund Thomas and Edith Hall. The seminars and conference featured papers on topics as diverse as North-Eastern painters, poets and novelists to antiquarianism, responses to archaeological finds from Roman Britain, naturalists reading ancient botanists, the television detective series Vera, the history of the Classical Association local branch, pageants, dramatic productions, statuary, architecture, autodidacts and workers’ education. The essays are currently being edited by Hall and Thomas and will be published as a collection shortly.
This project aims to bring Classics and communities together, by supporting interactions between our department and the public locally, notably by outreach in state schools and events in museums. For further details see the project website.
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