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Sentimental Journeys: Andromache in the Torrid Zone

Speaker
Miranda Stanyon
Venue
Lecture Theatre, Ioannou Centre, 66 St Giles
Date

Image: Andromache mourning over the Ashes of Hector, ca. 1780 CE, Image © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

The 2026 annual Classics and English lecture will be delivered by Dr Miranda Stanyon (University of Melbourne), in the Ioannou Centre lecture theatre and online at 2pm on Tuesday 12 May.

"The Trojan woman Andromache was ubiquitous in eighteenth-century British culture, at home on the stage and page, in music and material culture, high-toned history painting and everyday ephemera. While Andromache’s most striking receptions today often connect her with post-war displacement and the plight of refugees, in the eighteenth century she was a thoroughly domesticated subject, bound up with discourses of hearth and home in a period when female conduct was under intense and changing pressures. ‘Domestick Virtues concern all the world,’ as the Spectator observed, ‘and there is no one living who is not interested that Andromache should be an imitable Character.’ Yet toward the end of the century, English writers increasingly sent out Andromache figures into foreign parts. How was this domestic paragon appropriated and deployed in scenes of colonial encounter and empire building? What might her travels bring to conversations in comparative and world literature? This lecture addresses such questions through the case of John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative, of a Five Years’ Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796), a bestselling depiction of a slave plantation society, and a text whose habits of classical quotation have gone largely unremarked."

Miranda Stanyon is a senior lecturer in English at the University of Melbourne, where her research focuses on literary and aural cultures of the long eighteenth century. Her publications include Resounding the Sublime: Music in English and German Literature and Aesthetic Theory (2021) and the co-edited collections Music and the Sonorous Sublime in European Culture (2020), with Sarah Hibberd, and Music as Classical Reception: Amplifying Antiquity (2025), with Emily Pillinger. She currently holds an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award for a project on receptions of Andromache.
 

Join us online

For those of you who cannot make it in-person, you are welcome to join us in on Zoom. The link will be available here soon.

In-person accessibility

The Ioannou Centre's Lecture Theatre is located on the ground floor and the Centre is fully wheelchair accessible; an accessible toilet is located on the ground floor and on the first floor. Please see the online Access Guide for more details about the building's accessibility. Feel free to contact the APGRD with any queries.