Tag Archives: Greek

Contemporary Greek Film Cultures 2013 Conference

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The Department of Classics and our Centre for Hellenic Studies is proud to support a two-day conference on contemporary Greek cinema to be held at the Hellenic Centre in London in July:

Contemporary Greek Film Cultures 2013: International Conference
5-6 July, The Hellenic Centre, London

At a time when news surrounding Greece has almost exclusively been about the financial crisis, it is imperative to redress the balance by examining the productive forces of culture in the country, maintaining that Greece is something more than a country in debt. Contemporary Greek Film Cultures 2013 is an international conference for the study of Contemporary Greek Film, co-organised by the Universities of Reading and Glasgow. This 2-day conference seeks to actively help expand the current scholarship in Greek Film Studies, and help promote a more concerted study and theorisation of Contemporary Greek Cinema, reflecting on the multi-faceted contexts of its production, distribution and research, in Greece and abroad.

Register online at:
http://www.store.reading.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=2&modid=2&prodid=207&deptid=16&catid=14

New Online Publication on the Greeks in Bactria and India

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The online Hellenistic Far East Bibliography, maintained by Dr. Rachel Mairs, has just been updated (www.bactria.org ).  The Hellenistic Far East Bibliography project originated in the 2011 print publication The Archaeology of the Hellenistic Far East: A Survey: Bactria, Central Asia and the Indo-Iranian Borderlands c. 300 BC – AD 100 (Oxford: BAR).  It aims to collate and review publications on the archaeology and epigraphy of the Hellenistic-period Greek settlements of Central Asia and India.  Supplement 1, now available online, covers new publications 2010-2013.  Supplement 2 (forthcoming) will review several recently-published corpora of Greek inscriptions from Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia.

Celebrate Like It’s 776 BCE: The Ancient Greek Olympics and Other Festivals

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On Saturday April 28th the Department of Classics was delighted to host 40 members of the general public who attended a free Study Day on the Olympics and other festivals. We offered a programme of six talks on different aspects of ancient festivals, with plenty of time for questions. The audience, which ranged from school students to retired members of the University, and visitors from Italy, were very engaged with the topics. Their responses to the day overall praised the range and depth of the talks; everyone reported that they were entertained, informed, and stimulated. Guests also took the opportunity to visit the Ure and enjoy its outstanding collections.

The Departments thanks are due to the presenters, to Alice Le Page for help with publicity, to Nina Aitken for help with catering and signage, and to Philip Smither for help in the Ure Museum.

The programme was as follows:

  • Professor Ian Rutherford, How They Organised the Ancient Olympics
  • Dr Amy Smith, Nike: Victory at the Olympics and on Athenian Vases
  • Dr Emma Aston, Knocking on Hellas’ door: Thessaly, Macedon and pan-Hellenic participation
  • Dr Matthew Nicholls, Bread and Circuses
  • Dr Susanne Turner, In Cold Blood: Dead Athletes in Classical Athens
  • Professor Barbara Goff, The imaginary Greece of Baron Pierre de Coubertin

Legacy of Greek Political Thought Network Holds Workshop at Reading

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The Legacy of Greek Political Thought Network held an international research workshop at the University of Reading, 2-3 December 2011.

The Network is open to anyone whose research includes the many ways in which the political thought of ancient Greece has been represented, deployed, challenged or creatively transformed in subsequent cultures.  For this workshop, generously funded by the British Academy, the rubric was to investigate lesser-known such transformations.  Accordingly we investigated such diverse objects as Lutheran pacifists, German film-makers, democratic or anti-democratic theorists of various periods, and the military career of Socrates.  Each panel generated substantial discussion and we were thus very grateful to the Departments of Classics, Politics and History, who provided frequent tea-breaks.

The workshop concluded with plans to meet again in Bristol next year, and to undertake a special issue of the Classical Receptions Journal.  The Network would like to thank all the speakers, delegates, funding bodies, and office staff involved.

New Monograph by Prof. Barbara Goff and Dr Michael Simpson

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Goff, Simpson, OlympicsThinking the Olympics: the classical tradition and the modern Games (London: Bloomsbury/Bristol Classical Press, 2011) is the first book to focus on the theme of tradition as an integral feature of the ancient and modern Olympic Games. Just as ancient athletes and spectators were conscious of Olympic traditions of poetic praise, sporting achievement, and catastrophic shortcoming, so the revived Games have been consistently cast as a legacy of ancient Greece.

The essays here examine how this supposed inheritance has been engineered, celebrated, exploited, or challenged. Deriving from a range of disciplines including cultural history, classics, comparative literature, and art history, the essays address aspects of the Games as varied as oratory, praise poetry, ideas of victory and defeat, the athletic body, neoclassical painting and architecture, and contemporary advertising. The Athens Games in 2004 were widely represented as a return to ancient, and modern, origins; the Beijing Games in 2008, meanwhile, saluted a radically different ancient civilisation. What is the Olympic future for ancient Greece?

Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson have collaborated on several ground-breaking works on classical reception, including most prominently Crossroads in the Black Aegean: Oedipus, Antigone and dramas of the African diaspora (Oxford: OUP, 2007) and most recently ‘Voice from the Black Box: Sylvain Bemba’s Black Wedding Candles for Blessed Antigone’, in Helene Foley and Erin Mee ed., Antigone on the Contemporary World Stage (Oxford: OUP, 2011). They are currently working on a study of classics in the British Labour movement.