Artistic and Honorary Associates

Artist Associates

Photograph of Marina Carr by Yousef KhanfarMarina Carr

Marina Carr is an Irish playwright of international standing, whose work has been produced by the Abbey Theatre, the Gate, Druid, The Royal Court, Wyndhams Theatre, The RSC, The Tricycle, The MacCarter Theatre, San Diego Rep, Milwaukee rep. A number of her plays have been inspired by Greek tragedies and are considered ‘classics’ of the modern theatre (…By the Bog of Cats based on Euripides’ Medea (Abbey Theatre, 1995; revival 2015); Ariel (a version of Oresteia, Abbey Theatre, 2002); Hecuba (RSC 2015); Phaedra Backwards (McCarter Theater, Princeton, 2011)). The plays have been translated into many languages and produced around the world. Prizes include Windham-Campbell Prize (Yale) 2017 for her body of work, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the American/Ireland Fund Award, the E.M Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Macaulay Fellowship, and the Puterbaugh Fellowship. She is a member of AOSDANA. Marina has taught at Trinity, at Villanova and at Princeton. Currently she lectures in the English department at Dublin City University.

Struan LeslieHeadshot of Struan Leslie

Struan Leslie is a collaborative movement director, director, deviser of new work, choreographer and teacher. He trained at London Contemporary Dance School and internationally in dance and movement. His work in all these fields has been produced internationally and challenges and advocates through his practice for the recognition for the role of the body in performance. He is Head of Movement at Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama and held the same role at the Royal Shakespeare Company, 2009-14. His association with APGRD began in 1999 through Oliver Taplin, who was adviser on Ted Hughes' adaptation of The Oresteia at the National Theatre, London, directed by Katie Mitchell. Subsequently Fiona Macintosh invited Struan to present a paper on his work with choruses across his practice which was published in The Ancient Dancer in The Modern World (2010). Over the last 20 years Struan has contributed to the work of APGRD as director, dramaturg, mentor and teacher. His work in classical text includes seminal productions of Iphigenia at Aulis, Women of Troy and The Suppliants. Notable also is his exploration and application of the role of the chorus in all areas of performance including: opera (Jephtha and The Sacrifice at Welsh National Opera); orchestral staging (Aurora Orchestra at the BBC Proms and Epitaph of Species at RWCMD); circus (Hope at National Centre for Circus Arts and Illuminations, Aldeburgh Festival); choirs ('There’s me and There’s you' for London Jazz Festival and British Council with the Goldsmith’s Vocal Ensemble and the BBC Singers at the BBC Proms). The ethos of the ancient Greek chorus is also key to his devised work.

Suzana Ograjenšek

Suzana Ograjenšek is a former APGRD research assistant and co-editor (with Peter Brown) of Ancient Drama in Music for the Modern Stage (2010), and Life Member and former Research Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge. She graduated with a PhD from Cambridge University on the subject of Handel and London opera in the 1720s. Afterwards she embarked on a professional singing career, specializing in baroque performance. For the APGRD, her group La Falsirena performed the recital Ah, qual s’apre al mio cor tragica scena, featuring arias from eighteenth-century tragic operas by Handel, Gluck, Bioni, Leo, Feo and Traetta. Suzana’s recent singing engagements include Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea with William Christie at Teatro Real in Madrid and L’Orfeo with Ivor Bolton at Theater an der Wien in Vienna. She is currently completing the edition of the first version of Il pastor fido for the Hallische Händel-Ausgabe. Further information can be found on Suzana's website.

Alice Oswald

Alice Oswald is an award-winning poet with an ever-growing reputation. She studied Classics at New College, and has in recent years increasingly visited Oxford and the APGRD. In 2012, she performed her poem Memorial, an ‘excavation of the Iliad’ for us, and she returned to the Archive in October 2016 to perform from her latest collection, Falling Awake and from unpublished work-in-progress. She was Oxford Professor of Poetry 2019-2023, when she collaborated with APGRD and DANSOX on Moon Viewing - a Postal Poetry Performance and our 10 hour overnight event, All-Night Epic.

A.E. StallingsPhotograph of A.E. Stallings standing with the ruins of ancient theatre behind her

A.E. Stallings is a Classicist, poet and translator and the recipient of multiple awards, including a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Runciman Award 2023. Alicia’s books include Archaic Smile (1999), Hapax (2006), Olives (2012), Like (2018), and This Afterlife (2022), which is a selection from all her previous collections. She gave a wonderful reading of her work for the APGRD in November 2021 and we look forward very much to working with her during the four years of her tenure as the new Oxford Professor of Poetry (from October 2023).

 

Honorary Associates

Lorna Hardwick 

Lorna Hardwick is Professor Emerita at the Open University. Her publications in the field of classical reception include Translating Words, Translating Cultures (2000) and New Surveys in the Classics; Reception Studies (2003) as well as a number of articles on drama and poetry. She has a particular interest in the impact of various kinds of translation and adaptation on modern perceptions of Greece and Rome and in the reworking of classical material in post-colonial contexts. She is, with Professor Jim Porter (University of Michigan) the Series Editor for the new series Oxford Studies in Classical Receptions: Classical Presences and is co-editor, with Dr Chris Stray (University of Swansea) of the Blackwell Companion to Classical Receptions (2008) and, with Carol Gillespie, of Classics in Post-colonial Worlds. She was founding editor of the Oxford Classical Receptions Journal (CRJ) which was launched at the end of 2009. Recent publications available here >

Laura Monrós-Gaspar

Laura Monrós-Gaspar is Associate Professor in English at the Universitat de València, where she leads the research group “Literature, Arts and Performance”. Since 2015 she has been Head of the Area of Performing Arts at the office of the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Culture at the UV. Her research focuses on the reception of Antiquity in the nineteenth century, on which she has published extensively. She is the author of Cassandra the Fortune-Teller: Prophets, Gipsies and Victorian Burlesque (Bari: Levante Editori, 2011) and Victorian Classical Burlesques. A Critical Anthology (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). Other recent publications include "Epic Cassandras in Performance (1795-1868)", in Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century, eds, Fiona Macintosh, Justine Mc Connell, Stephen Harrison, and Claire Kenward (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her latest project, to be published as an OUP monograph (2023), traces the relationship between women and the reception of the Classics in liminal spaces of entertainment throughout the nineteenth century.

Reinhard Strohm

Reinhard Strohm is the Heather Professor of Music at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy. His research interests include 18th-century Italian opera, particularly of Handel and his contemporaries (recent publications: Dramma per Musica: Italian Opera Seria of the Eighteenth Century, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997. The Eighteenth-Century Diaspora of Italian Music and Musicians, ed. R. Strohm, Turnhout: Brepols, 2001); late-medieval music and its social context (publications: Music as Concept and Practice in the Late Middle Ages, ed. R. Strohm and Bonnie J. Blackburn, Oxford University Press, 2001); modernist/postmodernist debates in musical historiography (publications: 'Looking back at ourselves: the problem with the musical work-concept', in The Musical Work. Reality or Invention?, ed. M. Talbot, Liverpool University Press, 2000, 128-52. 'Collapsing the dialectic: the enlightenment tradition in music and its critics', in Musicology and its Sister Disciplines: Past, Present and Future (Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of the International Musicological Society, London, 1997), ed. D. Greer, Oxford University Press, 2000, 263-272. ‘Postmodern thought and the history of music: some intersections' - Revista Portuguesa de Musicologia 9 (1999), 7-24). Current projects include: Classicism, Ideology, Utopia in the 17th and 18th centuries; 18th-century music and social history (iconography, local history, opera singers and impresarios). Professor Strohm won the 2012 Balzan prize.

Photograph of Dame Marina WarnerMarina Warner

Professor Dame Marina Warner, DBE, FBA, is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. She is a novelist, short story writer and historian known for her many non-fiction books relating to feminism and myth. She has written for publications including The London Review of Books, the New Statesman, and Vogue. She holds a Chair in English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College and is chair of the judges of the Man Booker International Prize for 2015. Further information can found on Marina's website.

Yana Zarifi

Yana Zarifi (also known as Yana Sistovari) is the artistic director and co-founder of the international London-based theatre company Thiasos. She has explored eastern theatrical techniques, mainly dances that would allow a better understanding of the ritual character of Greek tragedy, especially of the function of the chorus. She has studied the functioning of the chorus in ceremonial contexts in Indonesia, India, Iran and Central Asia. She is Honorary Associate of Royal Holloway, University of London, and received a Getty Scholar Award for the 2006-2007 year to continue her research into Persian (Islamic and pre-Islamic) performance traditions in relation to theatre.