The Next Generation of Reception Studies at SACRA
On the 30th and 31st May 2024 the St Andrews Centre for the Receptions of Antiquity (SACRA) hosted a workshop. It was a collaboration with the Classical Reception Studies Network (CRSN). We welcomed Postgraduate Researchers and Early Career Academics based in the UK and working in the field of classical reception studies to join us up in St Andrews.
This was the third in a series of CRSN early-career events dedicated to network building. These events were generously funded by the Classical Association (CA). Opportunities for post-graduate networking, both nationally and internationally, have been slow to return to normal in the wake of the global pandemic. Even before 2020, reception scholars in the North of Britain could feel isolated due to much of the classical reception activity taking place in the South of England. The CA funded researchers to travel to St Andrews and to stay the night in student accommodation. This enabled far wider in-person participation than would have otherwise been the case.
On the Friday morning, PhD researchers gave 5 minute presentations, followed by fairly short panel discussions. We were not sure that people would have enough time to share adequately their research topics and stimulate the kinds of discussion we wanted. But, as Katherine Painter, a PhD candidate from Oxford told us:
“The lightning presentations worked really well. They introduced many great ideas and started even more conversations. Keeping to the time limit was actually a really good exercise for us to distil our research.”
The recently published Class in Classics Survey UK has shown that not everyone in our discipline has the opportunity to attend events like ours in person. This is true even when travel and accommodation are free or highly subsidized. So, we hosted a hybrid seminar on the Friday afternoon. During the seminar we enjoyed presentations from Drs Lucy Jackson (Durham), Justine McConnell (KCL) and Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis (St Andrews), all members of the CRSN Executive Committee.
The event was organised by SACRA co-Directors Henry Stead and Emma Buckley. The aim was twofold:
- To bring together Postgraduate researchers with several members of the UK Classical Reception community.
- To identify and spotlight new trends and emerging themes, methods and approaches in Reception Studies, represented by the research projects of the PG and EC Classical Reception community – the “next generation”.
Siobhan Mcshane, a PhD candidate from Durham University who attended both days in person said: “I really enjoyed the chance to hear about everyone’s research and realise how many different and exciting things people are doing in Classical Reception. It was also really helpful to hear from some more experienced researchers about the challenges they faced and their commitment to help us.”
Adeola Eze, a PhD candidate from Coventry University, told us “the workshop provided me with an excellent platform to learn about new research in classical reception, and I greatly appreciated the opportunity to share my research focus… The networking opportunities were invaluable to me, as I enjoyed connecting with other scholars.”
Kenneth Arthur, a PhD candidate at St Andrews, who attended the hybrid session online, noted that he felt the event made him “appreciate the interlink between reception studies and sub-Saharan African literature.”
Theshira Pather, a PhD candidate from the University of Edinburgh, told us she was “delighted at the opportunity to not only present an aspect of my research and receive feedback on it, but to also meet other reception scholars – the range of research presented was incredible! I hope to attend more events such as these soon!”
Lorena Phillips, a visiting PhD student at St Andrews, who also gave a lightning presentation on her research, said that it was “a great opportunity to network with other postgrads in the Classical Reception field. I particularly enjoyed the final discussion among the experienced professionals highlighting the challenges and opportunities of the field. It certainly provided useful insights for future job prospects.” Lorena works on Ted Hughes’ poetic reception of Ovid. She enjoyed the range of reception studies represented, especially “seeing the Classical Reception portrayed in different fields like, gaming, painting, and music.”
For reception scholars, interdisciplinarity is crucial. We have to work across the discipline of Classical Studies and sometimes several other subject areas. This can result in feeling less than confident at gatherings of those specialisms. One postgraduate presenter told us that “it was really nice for once to be able to talk about my research and not feel like a bit of impostor or outsider surrounded by “real” academic research (if you understand what I mean!) even though we were all working on such different things.” We do know what this researcher means, but those scare-quotes are doing some seriously heavy-lifting!
This observation highlights the importance of events such as SACRA’s Next Generation of Receptions Studies. There are still research communities in which reception scholars feel isolated. The CRSN was founded in the early 2000s, in part, to advocate for the new subject area and to build the critical mass of reception studies that would enable it to bed down in departments across the UK. Its remit has since expanded to promote international collaboration.
It has been a huge pleasure for us to meet so many of “the next generation” of classical reception scholars and to learn about their areas of expertise and to listen to what kinds of questions they are asking of such diverse and interesting materials.
Henry Stead and Emma Buckley (SACRA)