Ecologies and Futures in the Theory and Practice of Greek and Roman Performance and its Reception
The 25th Annual Joint Postgraduate Symposium on Ancient Performance and Reception, hosted by the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, University of Oxford and Royal Holloway, University of London, will take place on Thursday 3 and Friday 4 July 2025. This year’s theme will be: ‘Ecologies and Futures in the Theory and Practice of Greek and Roman Performance and its Reception(s).’
We are delighted to circulate our Call For Papers, the deadline for submitting abstracts is Friday 25 April - full details are included below or can be downloaded as a PDF.
CALL FOR PAPERS
ABOUT THE SYMPOSIUM
This Symposium focuses on the reception of Greek and Roman tragedy, comedy, satyr play, epic, lyric, and other texts in performance, exploring their afterlives through re-workings by writers and practitioners across all genres and periods. This year’s theme seeks to explore ecologies and futures, broadly defined. Ecology may be understood both in terms of creative responses to climate crisis and environmental destruction but also in terms of ‘ecologies of knowledge’ (De Sousa Santos 2009) which trace the exchange(s) of knowledge within and beyond a discipline (such as Classics, Bullen and Plastow 2024) or a set of practices (Nicholson, Milling, and Holdsworth 2018; Fragkou 2018). As Baz Kershaw’s influential Theatre Ecology (2007) showed, multiple senses of the term might be productively brought together to think carefully about not only past practices but future possibilities too. Participants are invited to consider any of the following prompts:
- Ecologies of performance, media, and knowledge
- Networks, exchanges, and interdependencies
- ‘Ecotones’: sites of meeting, transition, and exchange between biomes and practices
- Pollution and environmental destruction
- Landscape and performance spaces
- Interaction(s) with the non-human world
- Sustainability and salvaging
- Futures and speculative thinking
- Explorations of ecologies and futures from perspectives of ecocriticism, postcolonialism, critical race theory, disability studies, queer theory, feminism, posthumanism
The guest respondent on Day 1 in Oxford will be Dr Emily Pillinger (KCL), and Dr Rhiannon Easterbrook (RHUL) will be our guest respondent on Day 2 at Royal Holloway. Day 1 will include a keynote lecture by Prof. Vicky Angelaki (Mid Sweden University) on recent stage adaptations of plays by Sophocles and Euripides from an environmental perspective.
PARTICIPANTS
Masters and PhD students from around the world are welcome to participate, as are those who have completed a doctorate but have not yet taken up a post. The symposium is open to speakers from different disciplines, including researchers in the fields of classics, classical reception, modern languages and literature, and theatre and performance studies. Practitioners are welcome to contribute their personal experience of working on ancient drama. Papers may include demonstrations or recorded material. Undergraduates are very welcome to attend. This year’s symposium will be in person and online, although we encourage participants to attend in person where possible. We hope to be able to offer a small bursary for travel from afar.
Those who wish to offer a short paper (15 mins) or performance presentation are invited to send an abstract of up to 200 words outlining the proposed subject of their discussion to postgradsymp@classics.ox.ac.uk by Friday, 25 April 2025. If applicable, please include details of your current course of study, supervisor, and academic institution. There will be no registration fee. Please indicate in your application whether you would like to be considered for a travel bursary.