STARR seminars: Autumn 2026
The St Andrews Reception Research group will meet weekly 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 [email protected] to get the Teams meeting links.
Schedule
17 September, at 5pm
“Nolan’s Odyssey: A Roundtable”
Dr Ralph Anderson, Dr Jon Hesk, Dr Xiyuan Meng, Erin Limmack, Jana Mauri Marlborough, Anna Coopey (chair)
Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is a cultural phenomenon in and of itself, and one that has given many classicists (and non-classicists) food for thought since it came out in July this year. This roundtable, made up of senior faculty, early career researchers, and PhD students in a variety of specialisms, will discuss the film from different angles and foci, before opening up discussion to the room. Specific topics covered by speakers include violence and peace, morality and class, and the public response to Emily Wilson’s criticisms of the blockbuster film.
24 September, at 6pm
Aaron Pocock (Glasgow):
“Victor Davis Hanson: Spartan Aberration in Modern Asymmetrical Warfare”
This paper will examine how Victor Davis Hanson, as a military historian, farmer, and neoconservative political commentator, receives ancient narratives on Spartan hoplite culture, from the archaic to the classical periods, to explain the continued lethality and effectiveness of America’s engagement in asymmetrical warfare against the rise of Islamic terrorism after the September 11 attacks. It argues that Hanson placed Sparta as a clear example, in a wider analysis of ancient Greek agrarianism and its continued impact in Western culture, of how military intervention by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan would effectively respond to asymmetrical threats from the Middle East at the onset of the conflicts. Throughout his literature, Hanson refers to this idea of “decisive battle” as a hallmark of Western culture and history, to which the ancient Spartans were revered both in antiquity and modern polemical discourse as outstanding adherents. By analysing Hanson’s war narratives on Sparta’s effectiveness as a polis in mobilising its politically active citizen hoplites to engage in pitched hoplite combat, several key themes can be observed that contribute to the Western warrior ethos. This ethos is presented by Hanson as a contributing factor for America’s shock-and-awe response to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda from 2001 to 2011 with the invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003); driven by U.S. forces’ cultural connections to ancient Sparta through a shared connection of the European military ethos of decisive conflict, fought by politically active citizen combatants.
Hanson’s interest in Sparta’s role in Greek agrarianism, hoplite culture, and its relevance to American combat forces are tied to his methodology, politics, and personal circumstances. As a classicist, neoconservative commentator, and owner of a family-run farm in California, Hanson is interested in the intersection of Greece’s agricultural development and its effects on the civic life of the polis. He argues that Greece’s largely agrarian population gave rise to certain cultural values that contributed to not only the rise of the democratic processes in government, but also to a unique type of warfare endemic to the Greeks, the decisive and ritualised hoplite phalanx battle.
1 October, at 6pm
Anna Coopey (St Andrews):
“‘We Could Be Heroes’: De- and Re-Heroizing Homer in Kostas Varnalis’ The Diary of Penelope (1947)”
Throughout The Odyssey’s reception history, Odysseus has been heroized and reheroised, each time according to the ethics and values of his reception context. He has also been deheroised (or, arguably, anti-heroised), particularly in recent receptions, which have placed other characters (often women) at the fore of the Trojan War narrative. This paper explores a particular example of his, and other Odyssean characters’, deheroisation, in Greek communist author Kostas Varnalis’ 1947 novel, The Diary of Penelope. The text, a biting satire of Homer’s Odyssey which uses the epic to take aim at Greece’s right-wing establishment (and the wider “Western” world), deconstructs and deheroises both Odysseus and his “perfect” wife, Penelope, instead choosing to heroise Thersites, the obscure dissenting soldier in Homer’s Iliad, as its class-conscious, proto-communist rebel. Here, a left-wing poet transforms Homeric epic, and Homeric heroism, through the lens of left-wing counter-culture, redefining heroism, and its ancient Greek instantiation, for his own, alternative viewpoint.
In Varnalis’ use of classical Greek myth and literature to express a modern Greek subculture, in opposition to the establishment’s own use of classical Greece and influence by “Western Hellenism”, the author constructs what I have elsewhere defined as a “Counter-Classical Hellenism”. This is a version of the ancient Greek past which is expressive of an anti-Western, anti-establishment, and often anti-right-wing / anti-fascist viewpoint, with the classical adopted to counter all of those values which its “traditional” instantiation in culture represents. In 1947, in the midst of the extremely violence conflicts and oppression of the Greek Civil War, this alternative version of antiquity becomes particularly poignant, in an atmosphere of intense establishment “ancient worship” (αρχαιολατρεία) which saw “Western” models of antiquity adopted by the Right to firmly tie Greece to Britain and the USA in the burgeoning Cold War. This paper will allow this dimension of Varnalis’ use of the past to come to light, examining to malleability of antiquity in relation to Greece’s position on the international geopolitical stage, and its multiplicity, from reception to reception.
8 October, at 6pm
Marika Strano (University for Foreigners of Perugia):
“‘The Matron of Ephesus after Petronius: Classical Reception and the Reinvention of Tradition in Joyce’s Ulysses”
The reception of the tale of the Matron of Ephesus in James Joyce’s Ulysses offers a revealing example of the afterlife of classical narratives in modernity. While previous studies have often focused on questions of female sexuality, adultery, and the subversion of conjugal fidelity, this paper explores how the tale’s long process of transmission and transformation anticipates one of the central dynamics of modern classical reception: the reinvention of tradition through rewriting.
Originating in the Milesian tradition, reworked by Petronius in the Satyricon, and reshaped by Apuleius, the story of the Matron of Ephesus survives not as a fixed narrative model but as a text in constant transformation. Each version preserves elements of the previous ones while altering their function and meaning. This paper argues that such textual mobility provides a particularly productive lens through which to read Joyce’s relationship with antiquity.
In Petronius, substitution structures the narrative at every level: mourning gives way to desire, the dead husband is replaced by the living soldier, one corpse is exchanged for another, and moral exemplarity yields to ambiguity. Similarly, Ulysses is build upon a series of transformations in which classical figures and structures are displaced and reimagined: Odysseus becomes Bloom, Penelope becomes Molly, and Telemachus becomes Stephen.
The Matron of Ephesus should therefore be understood not merely as a classical source for Joyce, but as a paradigm of the continuing life of ancient texts. Its reception in Ulysses reveals how classical narratives enter modernity not through preservation, but through adaptation, displacement, and creative reinvention.
15 October, at 6pm
Dr Ioannis Tzortzakakis (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki):
“From Plato’s Cave to the TVA: Loki and the Afterlife of Platonic Myth in Contemporary Streaming Culture”
This paper examines Disney+’s Loki as a contemporary case study in the reception of ancient philosophical myth within American popular culture. Rather than treating the series simply as an adaptation of Norse mythology or as an extension of Marvel’s comic-book universe, the paper asks how Loki reactivates Platonic narrative structures concerned with illusion, authority, self-knowledge, choice, and cosmic order. Its central claim is that the series stages a modern Nachleben of Platonic myth: ancient philosophical patterns survive through mediated, hybrid, and commercially popular forms, passing through Scandinavian mythology, Marvel comics, cinematic world-building, and serial streaming culture.
The paper focuses especially on the Allegory of the Cave, the Ring of Gyges, the noble lie, and the Myth of Er from Plato’s Republic. The Time Variance Authority may be read as a cave-like institution that organises perception, suppresses alternative realities, and presents its own constructed order as metaphysical necessity. The false Time-Keepers and He Who Remains raise questions about political theology, narrative control, and the fabrication of legitimising myths. Loki’s encounter with his variants, and especially with Sylvie, reframe the trickster as a figure of philosophical awakening: a character forced to move from theatrical self-invention toward ethical self-recognition.
Methodologically, the paper combines classical reception studies, Warburgian ideas of survival, and analysis of contemporary transmedia storytelling. It argues that Loki is valuable for reception studies because it shows how antiquity can persist without direct quotation or explicit adaptation. Platonic myth here functions as a deep narrative grammar: a structure through which modern mass culture thinks about freedom, determinism, identity, memory, and the politics of storytelling. In this sense, Loki offers a productive example of how classical philosophical myths continue to operate within popular visual culture, not as static inheritances, but as dynamic forms repeatedly reassembled for new media, audiences, and ideological contexts.
29 October, at 6pm
Carlotta Piantanida (Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza”):
“History’s Pawns: The Use of Boxers in Mussolini’s Rome”
Mussolini’s regime employed a propagandistic campaign that utilised Ancient Roman visual imagery, more specifically religious imagery, to elevate the status of his modern Rome to that of antiquity. This paper focuses on the sculptures on the perimeter of the Stadio dei Marmi, one of the four stadiums within the Foro Italico. The Stadio dei Marmi is one of the most commonly researched stadium within the Foro Italico due to it being the most well-preserved of the four stadiums, and the scholarship regarding it follows two parallelling ideas. The first, and most prominent, focuses on its Romanità and Mussolini’s attempts to use architecture and art as a way to recreate the Roman Empire. The other focuses on Mussolini’s interest in promoting athleticism and strong bodies in the art he commissioned.
Previous research has made it clear that Mussolini created art with strong visual and contextual connections to Roman antiquity to promote his ideal “New Italy” and “New Italian”: a country of strong, athletic men. However, the existing scholarship solely focuses on the similarities between Mussolini’s commissions and those made in antiquity. It creates a homogeneous view of the art, rather than acknowledging the subtle and deliberate omissions made by Mussolini and their impact on the works’ reception. Specifically with the Stadio dei Marmi, scholarship focuses on the stadium’s uniformity, rather than the individual sculptures and artists that helped decorate it.
This study takes a more individual approach to the stadium’s sculptures, focusing solely on its depiction of boxers and how these depictions took from antiquity. Its aim is to forge a connection between Mussolini’s artistic omissions, and explore how that helped to rewrite antiquity, as well as create the image of the “New Italian”.
5 November, at 6pm
Athanasios Chatzigrigoriou (St Andrews):
“The Voice of Oedipus in 20th-Century Modern Greek Poetry”
This paper explores the multifaceted reception of the Oedipus myth across twentieth-century Modern Greek poetry and prose. From C. P. Cavafy and George Seferis to Yannis Ritoss, Miltos Sachtouris, and Iakovos Kampanellis, classical figures such as Oedipus, Antigone, and Jocasta are continuously reinterpreted to reflect modern existential, political, and historical anxieties. By examining how modern Greek authors negotiate their lineage with classical tragedy, this study highlights the unique tension between tragic inheritance, personal identity, and twentieth-century historical trauma.
12 November, at 6pm
Professor Yoandy Cabrera (Rockford University, Illinois):
“From Homer to Hispanic Worlds: Achilles, Rage, and Desire”
This paper examines portrayals of Achilles’ rage and desire from Homer to several Hispanic authors – from the Spanish Golden Age to the 21st century – who use themes of gender transgression, homoerotic desire, and liminality to question human nature and denounce social inequality and dictatorship. The works analysed include El Aquiles (1611) by Tirso de Molina, El caballero dama (17th century) by Cristóbal Monroy y Silva, Antes que anochezca (1992) by Reinaldo Arenas, and Ilíada (2016), a theatre version by Guillem Clua.
I demonstrate how these authors, writing in different historical periods, draw on ancient traits of the mythological figure Achilles – such as his thymotic impulses (Sloterdijk), political agency, and outsider status – to illuminate and interrogate contemporary issues, including queerness, democratic practice, and totalitarianism. I further explore how these themes resonate differently in Spain and the Americas. Additionally, I challenge the notion of the “death of tragedy”, as proposed by Steiner (1961) and echoed by other scholars in Felski (2008), arguing instead that the tragic persists in diverse forms beyond the traditional theatre and across historical contexts, as recently exemplified by Weiss (2022). I argue that Achilles’ reception enables a dynamic interplay between tragedy, queerness, and myth, grounded in their shared elasticity, plurality, ongoing resignification, and states of suspension.
Unlike the English literary tradition, the Hispanic reception of Achilles has been a significant topic since the medieval period and the early formation of Hispanic culture (Casas Rigall 1999). This reception spans from Spain and Europe to Latin America, beginning with epic poems and comedias and continuing into the 21st century through theatre plays, novels, and web series. Tirso de Molina and Monroy y Silva rework the episode of Achilles on Skyros from a distinctly Spanish perspective, using it to explore the complexities of human nature. In doing so, they initiate the construction of a “Hispanic Greece” – a theoretical space of in-betweenness that stretches from the Baroque garden to the Colombian forest. This exploration navigates geographical, gendered, linguistic, and cultural liminalities, challenging traditional conceptions of the “epic hero” and embracing the potential of the intermediary state as a third space, as theorised by Misemer (2017). On the other hand, Clua discusses war and homoerotic desire within a democratic system during the 21st century, and Arenas reimagines the revolutionary soldier’s body as a site of continuous homoerotic desire, blending Homeric epic with Cuban reality. His work subverts official narratives by linking erotic fluidity to political dissent. Through myth and desire, Arenas reclaims agency in a society that marginalises him. This study emphasises Achilles’ role in fostering discussions on gender and politics. In works by Tirso de Molina, Monroy y Silva, Clua, and Arenas, Achilles transcends traditional binaries of identity, culture, and gender, embodying a multifaceted and fluid identity described as a “kaleidoscopic totality” (Chamoiseau in Andújar and Nikoloutsos 172). Rooted in mythology, queerness, and resistance to fixed definitions (Andújar and Nikoloutsos; Campos Muñoz; Frandinger), these works contribute to building a “Hispanic Greece” as a space for passionate affect, conflict, and self-questioning.
19 November, at 6pm
Adriana Marinelli (Parthenope University of Naples):
“Gnaeus Robertulus, Myself: Robert Graves’ Classical Alter Ego and his Latin Literary Production”
Robert Graves is a towering presence not only in twentieth-century English literature but in the history of classical reception itself. From I, Claudius to The White Goddess, and his translations of Suetonius and Lucan to his mythographic prose, his literary output is built almost entirely on the rewriting of antiquity in its many forms. However, a parallel and much smaller body of writings that Graves composed in Latin remains largely overlooked.
This paper takes as its starting point Graves’ comic short story “Life of the Poet Gnaeus Robertulus Gravesa”. Here, the author latinises his own name and casts himself as a Latin poet, presenting his own “biography” as though it were a genius English translation from a lost work of Suetonius. Not only does the text allows us to explore Graves’ persona both as a Latin poet in his own right and as an author fashioned on the Suetonian model, but it also playfully collapses the distance between the modern English writer and the ancient biographical genre he had spent a career reconstructing.
Building on these premises, the paper investigates Graves’ lesser-known Latin production proper. Given the constraints of time, further extracts will be examined across both prose and verse: a brief poem, personal correspondence, and excerpts from the Creweian Oration delivered during Graves’ tenure as Professor of Poetry at Oxford (1961-1966). The deliberate choice to range across these different registers is intended to bring into focus what it meant for Graves the English author specifically to write in Latin. Far from being a mere exercise in classical erudition, this choice constitutes a mode of self-positioning that reflects on his own identity as a modern English poet working in the shadow and in the borrowed voice of antiquity. Reading these texts closely, the paper asks what it means for a poet whose career was founded on reception of Latin literature to engage in Latin production, attending to questions of content, language, register, and style. Ultimately, it argues that Graves’ Latin writings should be read not as marginal curiosities but as a further, more intimate dimension of his lifelong impersonation of the classical past.
26 November, at 6pm, Venue TBC
Special Performance:
Angelos Sikelianos’ Daedalus in Crete (1942)
As part of the broader conference, “Greek Week”, STARR’s regular attendees are invited to attend a special performance of Angelos Sikelianos’ Daedalus in Crete (1942). This performance premieres A. Coopey’s English translation and adaptation of the text, and also marks the first performance of the play in the United Kingdom. It will be preceded by a short contextual lecture, giving an overview of Sikelianos’ life and work, and the historical context of the Axis Occupation of Greece. It will be followed by a short Q&A with cast and crew.
Daedalus in Crete depicts a rebellion against the tyrannical king Minos in Knossos. This rebellion is led by Daedalus, the famous craftsman and creator of the Labyrinth, with the help of Pasiphae, Ikaros, and Theseus. In the play, the Minotaur, the famous mythical monster whom Theseus is sent to kill, is actually Minos in a bull mask, and is easily defeated by the Athenian revolutionaries, who bundle him off while Knossos burns in the background. The king here becomes a metaphor for the occupying Axis forces in Greece, while Daedalus is the revolutionary artist – like Sikelianos himself – who guides the people towards successful revolt and liberation. Meanwhile, Theseus, Pasiphae, and Ikaros become stand-ins for the resistance efforts of EAM and ELAS, whom Sikelianos does not shy away from criticising. In his depiction of Daedalus, who becomes almost a self-insert character, he advocates for a resistant and alternative attitude based around his own conception of the “Delphic Idea”, which inspired his earlier dramatic interactions with antiquity in the 1927 and 1930 Delphic Festivals. In Daedalus in Crete, his construction of ancient Greek myth seeks to express and guide contemporary Greece in his own particular manner, and turn antiquity into a weapon to be used against fascist “Western” appropriations.
3 December, at 6pm
Toni Andres (St Andrews):
“Classics in the German Democratic Republic: Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich”
As one of the most prominent authors of children’s fiction in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich is frequently remembered as the “GDR’s Karl May”. May’s Winnetou-novels were particularly celebrated in West Germany (Federal Republic of Germany) even 100 years after their first publication. Few, however, know that Welskopf-Henrich’s lifelong passion for Classics led her to become the first woman appointed Professor of Ancient History at Humboldt University, Berlin. While from a middle-class background that provided her with access to a Humanist Gymnasium – and therefore a classical education – Welskopf-Henrich was a devout Communist from an early age and remained committed to antifascist resistance throughout the Nazi dictatorship.
In recent years, scholars have begun to reassess her contributions to Ancient History, situating them within the broader landscape of the Humanities in the GDR. This scholarship, however, has largely overlooked her extensive writings for newspapers and magazines beyond the discipline. These publications offer valuable insight into her broader educational vision, one grounded in Marxist theory, socialist ideals, and a sustained engagement with antiquity. Drawing on previously unpublished manuscripts, personal correspondence, and other archival materials, this paper will explore Welskopf-Henrich’s conception of a Marxist Classics and consider how it informed her understanding of education, scholarship, and the role of the ancient world in socialist society.
10 December, at 6pm
Suchismita Ghoshal (Indira Gandhi National Open University):
“The Paganism That Never Was: Classical Antiquity, Invented Tradition, and the Making of Britain’s Folk-Horror Past”
What if the “pagan past” repeatedly invoked by British folk horror was never a stable historical inheritance waiting to be recovered, but a cultural past progressively assembled through classical texts, archaeological fragments, Romantic imagination, antiquarian scholarship, folklore, religious reconstruction, and cinema? This paper explores that question by tracing how classical antiquity became entangled with the making of Britain’s imagined pagan landscape, and how that imagined antiquity subsequently acquired the appearance of cultural memory, religious continuity, and even lived experience. It approaches the subject not simply as a history of classical influence, but as a history of how societies learn to recognise, authenticate, and emotionally inhabit a past they can never fully recover.
The paper’s starting point is an encounter with a recurring paradox in British folk horror: landscapes, rituals, seasonal customs, isolated communities, ruins, and stories are presented as remnants of an ancient pagan world, even when their historical genealogies are fragmentary, contested, or demonstrably modern. This tension has shaped an interest in the epistemic relationship between folklore and literature: when does a story become evidence, when does repetition become tradition, and when does tradition acquire the authority of antiquity? The paper therefore reads Ovid and Tacitus not as transparent witnesses to the ancient world, but as already mediated literary constructions. Ovidian metamorphosis, sacred landscapes, bodily transformation, and unstable human/non-human boundaries are considered alongside Tacitus’ ethnographic construction of Britain and its peoples, allowing classical texts themselves to enter the paper as technologies of cultural imagination.
The paper then follows these classical inheritances into Roman Britain, where archaeological remains, inscriptions, temples, votive objects, sacred springs, burial sites, and landscapes become fragments from which later generations reconstruct religious worlds. Romantic engagements with ruins, nature, the sublime, and the “primitive” are placed alongside Victorian antiquarianism and folklore scholarship, examining how customs, oral traditions, seasonal practices, charms, legends, and supposed “survivals” were collected and classified as evidence of an enduring pagan substratum. Here, folklore studies, the history of religions, and cultural anthropology become essential to the paper’s inquiry into who possesses the authority to define authenticity, continuity, and tradition.
The emergence of modern paganism introduces a further paradox: traditions reconstructed through antiquarian and folkloric frameworks can subsequently become lived religious realities. Drawing on phenomenology of religion, the paper asks how a landscape, ritual, object, or story can be experienced as ancient and sacred even where historical continuity remains uncertain. This also allows the paper to consider the social and philosophical dimensions of tradition: communities do not merely inherit the past, but select, reinterpret, embody, and transmit it.
Finally, the paper turns to British folk horror, particularly The Wicker Man, Blood On Satan’s Claw, A Field in England, and Enys Men, as cinematic spaces where these accumulated receptions become embodied and affective. The paper’s central argument is that folk horror does not simply represent an ancient paganism. It reveals what happens when an invented or reconstructed antiquity becomes experientially real enough to organise community, memory, belief, belonging, and fear. In this sense, the paganism that never was is not simply false history, but a powerful cultural formation through which classical antiquity continues to live, transform, and haunt modern Britain.
17 December, at 6pm – TBC
[Last updated: 29 September 2026]