Semester 2 2025 Reading Classics Research Seminars and Ure Lecture

We are pleased to announce the launch of our Reading Classics Seminar Series for Semester 2 2025, 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 19 February 2025, we welcome a diverse group of speakers in our Departmental seminars. Our Semester 2 seminar series will explore a variety of topics and periods of Classical studies. Most seminars are hybrid and will be livestreamed on MS Teams. No registration is required. Attendance is free and open to all!

We are also pleased to invite you to attend the 2025 Ure Lecture by Dr. Jane Masséglia (University of Leicester) on “The Trojan War Mosaic at Ketton: How Greek Stories Came to Roman Britain”. Join us on Friday, 28 March 2025 at 5 PM for an exciting talk and reception. Entry is free, but booking is required here.

For more information, contact e.m.m.aston@reading.ac.uk.

Below you can find a poster with all titles and times (UK Time):

Full list of titles

19 February – 16:00-17:30 (Edith Morley G25)

Prof. Lene Rubinstein, Royal Holloway, University of London, Displaced civilians in fourth-century Athens: Social repercussions and political challenges.

20 March (Thursday) – 16:00-17:30 (Palmer 102) [This talk will only be in-person]

Dr Elena Chepel, University of Vienna, Festival mobility in Graeco-Roman Egypt.

28 March – 17:00-18:00 (Henley Business School G15)

Dr Jane Masséglia, University of Leicester, The Trojan War Mosaic at Ketton: how Greek stories came to Roman Britain. [Registration Required Here]

30 April – 16:00-17:30 (Edith Morley G25)

visual artists and researchers Aaron Ford (Institute of Classical Studies) and Hardeep Dhindsa (King’s College London), Race, Empire, and Decoloniality Seminar.

14 May – 16:00-17:30 (Edith Morley G25)

Alessandra Rocchetti, University of Oxford, The spatiality of magic across curse tablets, literary, and para-literary sources.

21 May – 16:00-17:30 (Edith Morley G44)

Dr Davide Massimo, University of Nottingham, “Hellenisation” and cultural identity in the Hellenistic world: insights from verse inscriptions.

 

Prof. Rosalind Thomas delivers the 12th Annual Percy N. Ure Lecture

The Department of Classics at Reading is delighted to welcome Prof. Rosalind Thomas to deliver its 12th Annual Ure Lecture. For this annual lecture, which celebrates the work of our first Professor of Classics, Prof. Percy N. Ure, we invite a preeminent scholar to deliver a public address on a topic of relevance to Percy Ure’s wide range of academic interests. This year Prof. Rosalind Thomas – Professor of Greek History, Dyson-Macgregor Fellow, Jowett Lecturer and Tutor in Ancient History at Balliol College, Oxford University – will deliver a talk entitled ‘Polycrates assigns a mother’: Greek Tyranny in proverb, collective memory and the local ‘polis histories’. The Greek tyrannies of the archaic period were the stuff of legend and folktale (or at least that dominates our literary sources), combined with narratives about their downfall fostered by the anti-tyrant feelings of later generations. Polycrates, tyrant of Samos (late 6th c.) was remembered through particularly vivid and colourful tales, vignettes and proverbs (as in the title), through which others were associated with cruelty and indulgent excess. It is hard to understand the social, political or economic impetus behind such tyrannies (Ure offered one famous theory), or to match the magnificence and building projects with the accounts later Greeks wanted to tell about them. This paper examines some of the most interesting accounts in the later ‘polis histories’ of their own local tyrant(s), and – with an eye to Herodotus and other comparisons – asks whether tyrants were an embarrassment or a paradoxical source of price generations later. It also examines what these later accounts might reveal about the collective memories of their archaic past, if not the archaic reality.

The lecture will start be at 4pm on 25th January, in the Van Emden Theatre in the Edith Morley building, on the University of Reading Campus. All are welcome to join us for this public lecture but please register  in advance at https://www.store.reading.ac.uk/conferences-and-events/faculty-of-arts-humanities-social-science/dept-of-classics/12th-annual-percy-ure-lecture. For any further questions, please contact Prof. Amy C. Smith, Joint Head of Department.