
Dr Leo Kershaw holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford, for which he researched performances and adaptations of Medea in South Africa from the 19th to the 21st century, supervised by Professor Fiona Macintosh. He is a Tower Junior Research Fellow in Greek Mythology at Christ Church College, Oxford (2025-2029), working on receptions of Greek tragedy and comedy in South African protest theatre during the Black Consciousness Movement. He has taught as a Language Instructor in Greek and Latin at Oxford’s Faculty of Classics and as a Lecturer in ancient Greek theatre at the University of Warwick and does some teaching in Classical Reception with the APGRD. In 2024 he co-convened the Institute of Classical Studies and Classical Reception Studies Network’s seminar series, ‘Out of the Shadows of Empire’.
Leo has written for the CRSN Realigning Reception Takeover 2022 (‘“Beware of the neo-colonial wolf”: World Reception, Universality, and Decolonising the Academy’) and a digital exhibit for Re-Imagining Tragedy from Africa and the Global South ‘The Academic in the Archive: Tracing the Workshopping Process of Oedipus at Colonus #aftersophocles’ (2024). He contributed a chapter for the forthcoming Blackwell-Wiley Companion to Hercules (ed. George W.M. Harrison), on ‘Herakles Outside the Western Canon’ and is contributing to the forthcoming Intersectional Medeas (ed. Zina Giannopoulou and Jesse Weiner) and Archiving and Performing Antiquity: Reshaping the Canon (ed. Justine McConnell, Sofia Frade, and Cécile Dudouyt).