STARR seminars: Autumn 2025
The St Andrews Reception Research group will meet weekly during the autumn term for a series of work-in-progress seminars. Each seminar will focus on an aspect of classical reception. Everyone is welcome to attend.
- When: 6pm on Thursdays, unless otherwise stated.
- In person: room S11 Swallowgate, School of Classics, St Andrews.
- Online: via Microsoft Teams.
Please email Anna Coopey, [email protected], to get the Teams meeting link.
Schedule
Thursday 18 September
Aaron Pocock (Glasgow):
“Points of Puncture – Donald Kagan on Spartan foreign policy in the Peloponnesian War”
I will be presenting a section of my thesis research on the misappropriations of ancient Sparta in alt-right/far-right American politics in the twenty-first century. Firstly, I will be discussing how the conservative classicist and political commentator, Donald Kagan, approaches the issues of Spartan foreign policy during the Peloponnesian War of 431-404 B.C.E.
Although my research will be focusing on far-right groups, it is worth developing a base of research, so to speak, that tackles more palatable sections of American conservatism. Kagan represents an interesting intersection between the classical tradition and contemporary American politics. As an ardent neoconservative, one that champions political and military interventionism and the development of an American hegemony across the globe, he is interested in utilising Sparta as a “useful” historical tool to help inform the issues facing American policymakers after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Overall Kagan takes a negative stance on how Sparta conducted itself in response to Athenian aggression and the maintenance of its own hegemonic authority in the Peloponnesian League. I will utilise Kagan’s readings of Thucydides to document how Kagan paints the Spartan state as being particularly ineffective in its foreign policy and ambitions, even though Sparta eventually defeats Athens. The main goal for understanding Kagan’s approaches to Sparta and by extension neoconservatism, is to identify whether the far-right responds to Kagan’s use of Sparta as a didactic tool for modern America, or if we see a complete rejection of it. Either avenue provides opportunities for investigation.
25 September
Stefano Parrinello (St Andrews):
“Reading Poetry as if it Mattered: Classical Reception in Ancient Philosophy”
2 October
Roger Rees (St Andrews):
“‘Awkwardnesses and Ineptitudes’: Ted Hughes in Correspondence for Shakespeare’s Ovid”
Lorena Phillips (St Andrews):
“Hughes’ Legacy and the New Ovidean Wave”
9 October
Robin Fodor (St Andrews):
“Dr Pentagram Meets Homer in Dublin”
16 October
Sophia Jacome (Edinburgh):
“Othering the Mother: How Modern Adaptations of the Oresteia Build New Rifts in the House of Atreus”
30 October
Erin Limmack (St Andrews):
title TBC- [on reception in Scottish graveyards]
6 November
Shannon McMillan (St Andrews):
-title TBC- [on the artistic reception of the ancient desert]
13 November
Sebastian Marshall (St Andrews):
“Relief in the Round: Terracotta Classicism and the Homeric Friezes of Ickworth House”
Originally posted on ” St Andrews Classics“, the School of Classics blog.
[Last updated: 15 September 2025]