Butser Ancient Farm

As we get stuck into another busy term of 21st century university life, the week we spent as Roman school teachers on an ancient farm in Hampshire feels literal worlds away. But what a wonderful world it was…

L-R: Althea (Oxford Masters student), Aster (Reading undergraduate), Nadin (Reading Masters graduate, Co-runs the Ancient Schoolroom), Prof. Eleanor Dickey (Runs the Ancient Schoolroom), Daniela (Ancient Schoolroom trustee, lecturer at Naples), Jacinta (Reading undergraduate)

From the moment we arrived at Butser Ancient Farm, Aster and I were immersed in a new (or rather very old) way of life. From ancient breeds of four-horned sheep, to Roman-style cleaning equipment, it was as though we had stepped through a portal into a calmer, more peaceful world. After a quick look around, we were soon stuck into our chores, and I discovered that a traditional broomstick is surprisingly effective tool for ridding a school room of dust and cobwebs.

As dark descended, we called it a night and adjourned to the Anglo-Saxon period for dinner. Eleanor made us a delicious fried fish recipe from ancient Roman recipe-writer, Apicius. It was meant to be the tail of a large female tuna caught near Byzantium, but that proved difficult to source, so Lidl salmon fillets had to make do! Apicius recommended eating it with white wine vinegar, so we did, and it worked remarkably well!

After preparing a garlicy, cheesy paste (moretum) and olive relish for lunch the next day, we all went to our respective time periods to sleep – in my case an iron age round house. I don’t think any of us slept well that first night, due to nerves, excitement, and the unfamiliar surroundings, but my chosen hay bale was still remarkably comfortable.

After breakfast the next morning we got ourselves costumed, then waited expectantly for our first students to arrive. We didn’t have to wait long as, just after opening time, two girls in ribbons and yellow tunics bounced in with an exuberant, ‘salve magistra!’ and the Ancient Schoolroom was officially under way.

After that the days sped by as we all settled into a relaxing and fulfilling routine. The teaching was full on, but so much fun, and it was wonderful to see how engrossed the children (and some adults) became in the activities. The school room began to feel like a second home with an air of safety and serenity that I really hope, at least some, real ancient Roman schools had. I have some lovely memories: a girl and her grandmother sprawled on the floor happily matching Phaedrus’s fables with their respective morals; a group of children crowded around Charles, eagerly learning compound interest; adults leaving us with their charges while they went to get coffee, as their unexpectedly studious children didn’t want to stop learning; recognising the same children coming back on different days because they felt they hadn’t learnt enough the first time; children sitting contentedly at Aster’s feet, writing and drawing with ink for the first time; parents thanking us for allowing their children to express their knowledge and enthusiasm about Roman mythology; and, my favourite memory of all, a tiny 6-year-old boy sitting patiently on a bench waiting for ‘the lady’ (aka Professor Eleanor Dickey) to teach him more maths.

Of course, even teachers have to eat sometimes, and food played an important part in our time at Butser. Lunch was always a welcome affair of Roman or Celtic style bread, served with moretum, olive relish and sometimes even butter and honey!

Our Roman dinners were as delicious as they were diverse, ranging from a ‘simple’ meal of porridge cooked in a genuine porridge pot and served with freshly foraged blackberries, to a fish soup made with fresh mussels and a whole sea bass, expertly prepared by Nadin. And those were just the meals we prepared for ourselves! One evening we had the great privilege of dining with Sally Grainger, author of Cooking Apicius, and her husband Dr Christopher Grocock. We demolished a beautiful loaf of bread; tasted about seven different types of garum (I particularly liked the swordfish one); indulged in a rich stew full of chicken, sausage, and pork belly; and got to observe Sally making goat’s cheese and honey cakes, which were even tastier than they looked.

As well as teaching, cooking, and eating, our week at Butser seemed to help all of us learn and grow in other ways. Aster discovered a natural talent for reed-pen making and tried a whole host of unusual foods for the first time; I turned out to be very good at lighting and tending fires, and embraced my new role as ‘fire woman’; and we all learnt and taught how to make corn dollies at a festival of Lughnasadh hosted by the farm, where we also listened to stories, drank mead, and danced to fiddle music.

By the end of the week we had all got quite used to sleeping on hay bales and constantly smelling of smoke, but we never took for granted the ability to explore and forage in the countryside, or the late-night bonding around a roaring fire, or the magic of gazing into an unpolluted night sky at the shining moon and twinkling stars.

I cherish my memories of the Ancient Schoolroom’s first time at Butser, and I look forward to making many more in the summers to come!

Written by Jacinta Hunter

Autumn Term 2023 Reading Classics Research Seminars

We are pleased to announce the launch of our Reading Classics Seminar Series for Autumn Term 2023, which will boost our Wednesday afternoons with constructive and stimulating lectures and discussions on various aspects of Classics research!

In this series of lectures, starting on 4 October, we welcome a diverse group of speakers from both the UK and abroad in our Departmental seminars. Our Autumn seminar series will explore a variety of topics and periods of Classical studies. All seminars will be livestreamed on MS Teams; tune in every Wednesday at 4pm (unless otherwise stated)! Attendance is free and open to all! Below you can find a poster with all titles.

Full list of titles

4 October

Maya Muratov, Adelphi, With strings attached: Articulated figures in antiquity

11 October

Najee Olya, William & Mary, Re-visiting portrayals of Africans in ancient Greek art: Recurring problems and new questions

16 October – Gordon Lecture (17:00)

Véronique Dasen, Fribourg, Play or cheat?: Games in Greek and Roman antiquity

25 October

Anne Alwis, Kent, Model Ascetics?: Exemplarity in Theodoret of Cyrrhus’ Religious History, joining link bit.ly/3tmY5wL 

8 November

Lea Rees, Oxford, A landscape biography of Dahshur: Chronological, functional and social transformations, joining link bit.ly/48FjuS3

15 November

Summer Court, Reading, Playing at (demi-)god: Hercules’ club, mould-blown glass, and sensory experience

Andy Fox, Reading, The death grove at the heart of Seneca’s Thyestes, joining link: bit.ly/3tx1MjP

22 November – Locus Ludi Public Talk (18:00 EM 125)

Tim Penn, Oxford, More than just fun and games: Why study board games in Roman society?

Two New Modules Consider the Ancient World beyond the Myth of Whiteness

By now, many classicists have begun to recognise and to think about how the study of ancient Greece and Rome has contributed to promoting and upholding structures of white supremacy and other forms of racism. Part of the discipline of Classics’ role in supporting white supremacy has been in the elevation of ancient Greece and ancient Rome above other ancient societies, as something distinctly glorious and worthy of study. By lumping the diverse societies of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds together, a myth of a White, Western civilisation took shape, allowing those invested in such a myth to draw a straight line between, for example, fifth-century BCE Athens and the twentieth-century United States of America. Such narratives also serve to exclude societies constructed as non-White or non-European from the myth of civilisation. However, challenging such narratives remains controversial. A recent episode of ‘Horrible Histories’ was accused of reinventing history when it highlighted the fact that people with dark skin have been present in Britain since prehistory and that African soldiers in the Roman army were stationed in Britain. Such controversies serve to show that there remains an urgent need for a conversation on the assumed whiteness of the ancient world.

For several decades now, academics at the University of Reading’s Classics Department have been working to unpick this side of the discipline, thinking about how Classics has been used to promote ideologies of racism and colonialism, how those subject to racist and colonialist uses of the Classics have formulated their own responses to and resisted such uses, and how the legacies of ancient Greece and ancient Rome have been felt beyond the so-called West. Relatedly, Classicists at Reading have been turning to the idea of interconnected Global Antiquities, in order to decentre ancient Greece and Rome from perspectives on the ancient world. In 2023, two new undergraduate modules bring the research of staff in this area to the undergraduate syllabus, contributing an already diverse and boundary-pushing offering of modules.

In the Spring Term of 2023, Dr Sam Agbamu introduced a third-year module on ‘Race and Ethnicity in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds’. Taking students from the earliest texts of the Greco-Roman literary canon right up to contemporary Classical Reception, the module focuses on how ideas of race and ethnicity took root in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds and how such ideas continue to shape the worlds we live in today. One of the aims of the module is to challenge the biological reality of race, by showing just how changeable conceptions of race in the ancient world were. As well as looking at how race was thought about in antiquity, students also study how authors, artists, and scholars racialised as ‘non-white’ have encountered the constructed whiteness of classical antiquity. The module encourages students to draw on their own experiences and perceptions of race and ethnicity in order to formulate personal responses to the texts and material studied. Part of this involves creative elements of coursework, in which students can respond to module material in a medium of their choosing, whether that be a piece of visual art, creative writing, or a film. The module is running again in the 2023/2024 academic year, and will be updated to take into account the rapidly developing scholarship in the field, as well as the changing global context in which the module situates itself.

In Spring 2024 Professor Rachel Mairs will be teaching a new second-year module on Ancient Ethiopia: The Aksumite Kingdom.  This module looks at the city of Aksum, in modern Ethiopia, and its empire in the third and fourth centuries CE.  Spectacular monuments remain at Aksum today: tall stelae used to mark the graves of kings, stone inscriptions, the ruins of palaces.  All of these speak to the Aksumite kingdom’s sense of its own power and place in the world.  Aksum is mentioned in a small number of ancient Greek and Roman historical sources, but this module takes a different angle by focussing on Aksumite accounts of their own history: whether inscriptions from the period of the empire itself, or later Ethiopian and Eritrean written and oral histories which give the memory of Aksum a special place in local identities in the northern Horn of Africa.

 

Written by Sam Agbamu and Rachel Mairs

Tragedy Queered: A conference to explore the impact of Graeco-Roman tragedy on queer culture (6-7 July 2023)

Greek and Roman tragedy has served as a platform to explore and discuss central issues regarding politics, identities, and societal issues, ranging from feminism, race, fascism, and communism to abortion, generational tensions, and national identity. LGBTQI+ issues of identities, desires and politics have also found a useful tool in ancient tragedy as a channel for exploration, discussion, and vindication. Tragedy has been queer, queered, and queering for many a decade now.

The international and interdisciplinary conference Tragedy Queered, which took place at the University of Reading on the 6th and 7th of July 2023, precisely explored the dialogue, relationships and cross-fertilisations between Graeco-Roman tragedy and queer culture. The conference developed substantial and consistent insights into a phenomenon that has remained almost untouched in scholarship. All fifteen speakers, from provenances as diverse as L’Aquila, London, Santa Barbara, Philadelphia, Oxford, and New York, and ranging in academic positions from postgraduate students to full professors, explored and analysed the use of ancient tragedy in queer culture in a vast array of media, including novels, drag, theatrical stagings, poetry, dance, film, multi-media performance, and biography. The papers, headed by the keynote speech on Judith Butler, Freud, and the house of Oedipus by Professor Orrells (KCL), exhibited a diverse plethora of queer-tragic receptions and dialogues. Among other issues, they explored the importance of the tragic character and plots of Helen and Philoctetes regarding the loss and struggles of AIDS in novels and drag, queer love and loss in dance and multimedia performance, how Athena is a good or bad example for trans experience, the tragic in pre-Stonewall poetic writing and the translation, tragic structures, plots and characters in film and theatre, and what can queer theory bring to ancient tragic texts and performances.

The conference and its speakers managed to do far more than I expected as organiser. It was able to establish points of departure for many aspects in the study of the relationship between tragedy and queer culture and also of the tragic and the queer; it was able to pay attention to queer culture before and after the Stonewall Riots, the historiographical starting-point for queer liberation; it was able to attest to queer lives, queer history and queer theory and the interweaved presence of tragedy in them; and finally, and perhaps most importantly, it was able to further consolidate and multiply a community of queer scholars, students, artists and people, past, present, and future. Keep your eyes peeled for the volume that will result from the conference, so you can see with you own eyes what Tragedy Queered was able to reveal, explore and unite on two summery tragic-queer days in Reading.

Special thanks to the Tragedy Queered sponsors: Institute of Classical Studies (SAS, UoL); The Department of Classics (UoR); Dean for Diversity and Inclusion (UoR); Research Dean for Heritage & Creativity (UoR). I am very grateful to Matthew Knight for his excellent and indispensable work in designing the poster, programme, and name tags and to Josh Ison for his essential help in guaranteeing that the conference ran smoothly and enjoyably. Thanks also to colleagues in the department for their support and encouragement.

 

Written by Dr. Oliver Baldwin

The Reading Ancient Schoolroom at Butser Ancient Farm’s Roman Villa

Butser Ancient Farm has invited the Reading Ancient Schoolroom to offer a Romano-British rendition of the Reading Ancient Schoolroom from the 1st to the 7th of August.

Run by Professor Eleanor Dickey and Research Associate Nadin Marsovszki, the Reading Ancient Schoolroom enables modern students to discover first-hand what the ancient world was really like, by attending a re-created ancient school. The Reading Ancient Schoolroom takes place in a replica of an ancient school, in which all participants wear Roman costumes and use replica ancient writing materials. Students practise the type of exercises that were commonly done in ancient schools and do so in a setting that uses the ancient rather than modern educational convention.

Notably, this marks the first occasion in which the Ancient Schoolroom will transport participants to Roman Britain, as its previous iterations were centred on ancient Egypt. As a result, adjustments have been made, such as transitioning from papyri to wooden tablets and adapting exercises accordingly. For instance, the reading exercise now revolves around Vergil’s Aeneid, instead of Homer’s Iliad. Moreover, several novel activities have been introduced, including a Vindolanda alphabet writing task, a Roman acting class, and progymnasmata  exercises.

Butser Ancient Farm is an open-air experimental archaeology museum and active research center, encompassing various historical periods from the Stone Age to the Saxons. Among its attractions are a Stone Age farm, a Bronze Age roundhouse, a Celtic village, a Roman villa, and Saxon halls. This unique setting is ideally suited to enhance the immersive learning experience we aim to provide.

For further details about Butser Ancient Farm, please visit www.butserancientfarm.co.uk. Additionally, we encourage you to explore our revamped website, where you can find more information about the Reading Ancient Schoolroom, at www.readingancientschoolroom.com.

We hope to see you at Butser!

Classics and Italian Colonialism: A Three-Day Conference at the Museo delle Civiltà, Rome (22-24 June 2023)

Written by Samuel Agbamu

Rome is a city steeped in the history of empire. Few tourists will fail to visit any number of the imposing remains of the Rome of the Caesars, be it the Colosseum, Pantheon, or the Forum. Yet the imperial history of Rome did not end with the putative fall of the Western Roman Empire, whenever we might date that, nor with Charles V’s sack of Rome in 1527, nor even with the incorporation of Rome into the Kingdom of Italy in 1870. Of the major European imperial powers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Italy stands out as perhaps the least discussed, either inside or outside Italy, and one of the least understood. Because of its easy association with the Fascist regime, which held power from 1922 to 1943, and the invasion of Ethiopia launched by Mussolini in 1935, the legacy of modern Italian imperialism is frequently subsumed into the question of Fascism. Yet Italy pursued an imperial agenda almost at the same time as being unified as a nation in the 1860s, and the legacies of its colonial endeavours persisted long after the death of Mussolini, and continue to be felt in many ways today. Furthermore, Fascism is well known for adopting, adapting, and inventing ideas drawn from ancient Rome, from the so-called ‘Roman salute’ to the symbol of the Fasces itself. Yet modern Italian imperialism, prior to Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922, had a long history of posing itself as ancient Rome’s successor, returning to regions that had once been part of the Roman empire.

It was with such considerations in mind that Elena Giusti (University of Warwick) and I organised a three-day conference in Rome in June 2023. When we began to put the event together, we did not know that we would be having these discussions in a country run by Georgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) party. Fratelli d’Italia are the heir to Mussolini’s Fascist party, and were swept into power partly on the basis of virulent anti-migration policies. Many of the migrants who are targeted by Meloni’s xenophobic rhetoric and policies depart for Italy from the coast of North Africa, especially Libya, a former colony of Italy. Similarly, many of the migrants originate from Italy’s former east African colonies. Italy’s right-wing, anti-immigration governments have been especially vociferous in their hostility towards those crossing the Mediterranean from North Africa to Europe’s southern shores, despite the fact that Italian imperial ideology once promoted the notion that the North African coastline was Italy’s ‘Fourth Shore’, and that Libya was, in fact, a part of Italy. Such ongoing ramifications of Italy’s past imperial claims, many of which were based on selective readings of North African ancient history, made the urgency of this conference acutely felt.

Rome’s EUR district was built for the Esposizione Universale Roma 1942, which never took place due to the outbreak of the Second World War. At the end of the road is the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana or the so-called ‘Square Colosseum’. Photo by author.

The conference was hosted at the Museo delle Civiltà in Rome, in collaboration with Rosa Anna di Lella and Gaia Delpino, cultural anthropologists working at the museum. Set within the imposing EUR district of Rome, the ultimate architectonic expression of Fascism’s self-representation, the museum holds the collections of the former Museo Coloniale, inaugurated by Mussolini in 1923. Recently, the museum has been working to contextualise and expose the hidden histories of its collections, culminating with the current exhibition, Museo delle Opacità. In this context, to host the conference in the heart of an area built in Fascism’s image, but in an institution working hard to address the legacies of colonialism and Fascism from within, offered a particular poignancy to the event’s proceedings.

Over the three days of the conference, we heard from not only classicists, ancient historians, archaeologists, but also scholars of Italian history and literature, as well as North African and East African history. Papers addressed such themes as Italian archaeologists’ promotion of colonialism in the Aegean and North Africa, the legacies of intellectuals who had used ancient history to support or resist imperial ideologies, ancient history in the Fascist Italian classroom, and new methodological and theoretical perspectives on Italian imperial history. The final day involved workshops organised by the museum on their colonial collections, while the conference was closed by Angelica Pesarini with a keynote on teaching Italian colonialism in the university classroom.

The conference confirmed that the relationship between Classics and colonialism in Italian contexts remains an important and still underdeveloped field of research. This remains the case despite a recent profusion of publications, including forthcoming monographs from Sergio Brillante and myself.  There especially remains much work to be done on this topic from an avowedly anti-/decolonial perspective . Elena Giusti and I plan to publish an edited volume with De Gruyter including contributions from the conference.

More information about the conference, including the full programme and paper abstracts can be found here.

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Institute of Classical Studies, the Past and Present Society, the University of Warwick Connecting Cultures funding scheme, and the Museo delle Civiltà in Rome.

Developments in Ancient Language Pedagogy

The following blog has been written by Jackie Baines, who organised a workshop on ‘Developments in Ancient Language Pedagogy’ held in the Department on Friday 19th May 2023. We would like to thank Jackie and all those involved for running such a successful event!

Steven Hunt – Edward Ross – Maiken Mosleth King – James Robson – Jackie Baines

On the 19th May I ran an international blended workshop on the topic of advances in ancient language pedagogy. The workshop came about as part of my research leave which, as a teaching intensive lecturer, has given me the opportunity to look at ways in which I might refresh my pedagogical ideas and practices. I am indebted to Edward Ross who assisted me with many aspects of the organisation of this event. The rationale for the workshop and the choice of talks and speakers came about as a result of experiences and observations over a number of years teaching Latin here at the University of Reading, which include the following:

Choice of Textbooks

For many years we used Jones and Sidwell Reading Latin as the main textbook with all its quirks and difficulties for complete beginners.  After looking at the suitability of many possible alternatives we subsequently moved to using Taylor’s Latin to GCSE which is very much more approachable in its presentation of grammar and its layout for 21st century students but has many drawbacks for moving on with speed and full understanding, to higher levels of Latin. 

Teaching Spoken Latin

This academic year (2022 – 2023) I am grateful to my colleague Professor Eleanor Dickey who organised weekly sessions of spoken Latin for colleagues, run by teachers from Oxford Latinitas. It was a revelation in a number of ways, principally, that there are definite advantages to learning to use a language, now considered ‘dead’ by many, as languages are normally used – that is to speak.  Latin was indeed taught orally until relatively recently, so why aren’t we doing more of it?  A subsidiary lesson for me was being returned to the position of student, at times most alarming and stressful when using a language I know well, but in a totally unfamiliar way.  I have set up a student focus group using Ørberg’s Lingua Latina per se Illustrata. I am impressed by the speed of vocabulary acquisition and grammatical understanding gained by reading and speaking using only (mostly!) Latin.

Online learning in the post-pandemic world

The pandemic has made us realise the possibilities of online tools for additional learning support.  The rise of AI, in particular Chat GPT is opening up a myriad of opportunities and unnerving problems, both for teachers and for the students themselves who need to have enough understanding to use such tools appropriately. Edward A.S. Ross has recently published an article discussing this further here. Edward and I are delighted to be able to announce that since the workshop we have been awarded Teaching and Learning Enhancement Projects funding by the University of Reading to investigate and trial ChatGPT as a conversational language study tool by codifying and standardising methods for using conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) models in ancient language classes.

Workshop talks

In the workshop we were treated to six stimulating and thought-provoking talks, listed below with abstracts available here. Speakers reflected on past practices and perceptions of ancient languages and how they have been taught along with learning how the emergence of new technologies and their use can be used to enhance our teaching. Thanks to all speakers for their contributions.

Emergent pedagogies in classical languages teaching in UK schools: Steven Hunt (University of Cambridge)

Capturing the Classroom: A Snapshot of Approaches to Latin Teaching in UK Universities: Mair E. Lloyd (Open University and University of Cambridge); James Robson (Open University)

Using Simple Grammar Videos to Flip the Classroom: Antonia Ruppel (Institute of Indology and Tibetology, LMU Munich)

Digital software as a pedagogical aid in teaching ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs: Maiken Mosleth King (University of Bristol)

A New Frontier: AI and Ancient Language Pedagogy: Edward A. S. Ross (University of Reading)

Living Latin in the Classroom: benefits and challenges of communicative approaches: Mair E. Lloyd (Open University and University of Cambridge)

 

Written by Jackie Baines

Postgraduate Colloquium 2023

On the 25th and 26th of May 2023, the Department of Classics at the University of Reading held its annual postgraduate colloquium. The colloquium is a chance for Masters and PhD students to share an aspect of their research with colleagues from the department in the form of a brief presentation. Students were able to present their research in a friendly and positive environment, with space for respectful and informative discussion. This year saw a fantastic mix of thought-provoking topics being presented from all corners of the classical world, triggering lots of interesting questions from the audience.

After the two day event, some of the students and staff from the department visited Park House for a well-earned celebratory drink. Here they are enjoying the sunshine!

Thank you to all of our staff and students from the department who took part in the colloquium, both those presenting and those sitting in the audience. We hope for an equally successful colloquium in 2024!

Summer Term 2023 Reading Classics Research Seminars

We are pleased to announce the launch of our Reading Classics Seminar Series for Summer Term 2023, which will boost our Wednesday afternoons with constructive and stimulating lectures and discussions on various aspects of Classics research!

In this series of lectures, starting on 3 May, we welcome a diverse group of speakers from both the UK and abroad in our Departmental seminars. Our Spring seminar series will explore a variety of topics and periods of Classical studies. All seminars will be livestreamed on MS Teams; tune in every Wednesday at 4pm! Attendance is free and open to all! To attend please follow this link: bit.ly/3Lyq4R4! Below you can find a poster with all titles.

Full list of titles

3 May

Erica Bexley, Durham, Looking for Octavia: history and reception

10 May

Alba Boscà Cuquerella, Salamanca/Bristol, How to apologise if you are a woman: some remarks on the use of gnomai by Euripidean female characters

17 May

Joe Watson, Warwick, Ciris’ progress: genre, metapoetry and philosophic ascent in the Ciris 

24 May

Diana Rodríguez Pérez, Oxford, Ancient repairs on Athenian pottery: preliminary thoughts – and a cup

31 May

Julie Doroszewska, Warsaw, Thinking of thinking: conceptual metaphors of cognition in the Plutarchian corpus

 

AHRC to fund expansion of Reading Ancient Schoolroom

The department has received a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to fund Nadin Marsovszki to work for a year expanding the Reading Ancient Schoolroom. The ancient schoolroom (www.readingancientschoolroom.com) is a re-enactment of a school from Roman Egypt in AD 301; Reading students and volunteers from a wide area teach local schoolchildren some of the literacy, mathematical, and linguistic skills that ancient children would have learned at school, using the original technologies (wax tablets, papyrus rolls, reed pens, inkwells, counting boards) and authentic exercises, while dressed as Romans, in a room with views of the Nile.

Nadin teaching in the ancient schoolroom in 2017 (Photo: Alex Wickenden)

For the past eight years the ancient schoolroom has been a rare event, normally held on campus just a few days each year. Although there is often demand for more of it (both children and volunteers not only learn a lot but also find it great fun), expansion has not really been practical because of the time constraints of its director, Professor Eleanor Dickey. Eleanor did much of the research underpinning the ancient schoolroom and originally started the event as a way to share that research with the public, but the pressures of her ongoing research and teaching limit the time she can spend on this activity. There is also a limit to the amount of time for which Edith Morley G40 can be taken away from the undergraduate students whose study space it normally is.

These restrictions will be lifted by the AHRC award, which will allow Nadin to take over running the schoolroom and bring it to schools instead of expecting them to travel to the university campus. Nadin is the ideal person to undertake this role and is a Reading Classics success story. A Hungarian by birth, she arrived at Reading in 2016 to start an undergraduate degree in Museum and Classical Studies. In her first term she took the ‘Texts, Readers and Writers’ module and met Eleanor, who immediately spotted her potential. Although Nadin started her course with limited English that initially prevented her from doing really well academically, she was obviously enthusiastic, hard-working and intelligent. With support and mentoring from various members of the department (not only Eleanor but also Amy Smith and Peter Kruschwitz), she rapidly blossomed into an academic star, eventually gaining a Distinction in the MA in Classics. She started teaching in the ancient schoolroom in 2017 and has continued to be involved ever since, as literature teacher, pottery teacher, maths teacher, and most recently Latin teacher.

Nadin’s strengths extend outside the university: while doing her MA she worked as a teacher at a school specialising in children with special educational needs. The teaching experience she gained in this role will be of great use to her in running the ancient schoolroom. But perhaps even more important is the passion she acquired for improving the experience and attainment that autistic children have in school, which led her to focus her MA dissertation on the potential usefulness of ancient educational techniques for autistic pupils today. So in addition to expanding the ancient schoolroom as a resource for all children, Nadin will be using the findings of her dissertation to produce adapted versions of it for autistic pupils.