Oblique Classicisms/Hidden Histories: The IGRCT Director's Annual Reception Series 2025/26 (ONLINE)

A new series dedicated to exploring emergent research at the intersections of antiquity and modernity

Classical Reception Studies is often centred on frontal forms of engagement, prioritising aspects of antiquity that more clearly and directly impact modernity. Indirect classical links and undercurrents are typically neglected since, arguably, their influence is much harder to spot. In this series, experts in Critical Classical Reception, Rhetoric, Music and Performance, and Comparative Literatures flip this approach on its head. Each talk will focus on twentieth- and twentieth and twenty-first-century receptions where connections with antiquity are indirect, tangential, tenuous, silent, distorted –even contactless, but nonetheless significant in shaping accounts of selfhood, the modern condition, creativity, race, sexuality, conflict, and the environment. Speakers will uncover hidden histories of this classical tradition, and reflect more widely on the possibilities of reading antiquity ‘on a slant’.

These lectures will be held online via Zoom. Please sign up to receive the webinar link.

AUTUMN

October 16th

Laura Jansen (Bristol): 'Introduction: 'Antiquity on a Slant' &

Katerina Stergiopoulou (Edinburgh): ‘From “Lesbos” to The Argonauts: American Women Writers and the Tenuousness of Classics’

November 13th

Michelle Zerba (Louisiana): ‘Occult Classicism and the Performance of Secrecy: the Eleusinian Mysteries and Aleister Crowley’s Rites of Eleusis’

November 27th

Mario Telò (Berkeley): ‘Stiff Tangents: Laura (1944)/Hippolytus’

SPRING

March 11th

Sean Gurd (Texas Austin): ‘Tangents and Parabolas: Varèse and the Brussels World Fair’

April 8th

Emily Greenwood (Harvard) ‘Thrice Removed: Black Classical Separation’

April 29th

Alexander Beecroft (South Carolina) ‘Ekphrastic Voyeurism: Gyges and Candaules in Anglophone Fiction of the 1970s and 1990s’