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).’
Join us online
For those of you who cannot make it in-person, you are welcome to join us on Zoom.
Symposium Programme
The full Programme of the Symposium is now available and can be downloaded as a PDF.
Thursday 3 July (Day 1) Oxford
(Third-floor Seminar Room, Radcliffe Humanities, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road, OX2 6GG – for a map, directions and accessibility information see the Humanities Building’s Access Guide)
10:00 – 10:15 Welcome and Registration
10:15 -11:00 Panel 1 – Miasma
-Michele Ciletti: Pollution Networks in Greek Tragedy
-Cecilia Burattin: Theatre and pollution: miasma and the configuration of theatrical space in Euripides’ Orestes
11:00 – 11:15 Break
11:15- 12:30 Panel 2 – Opera and Comedy
-Laura Muncaciu: The Future of the Tragic Voice Tragedy, Voice, and the Living Present of Opera
-Nassim Mandhouj: Voicing Bellies, Echoing the Wasps: Eurycles as an Ecotone in the French Renaissance Reception of Aristophanes’ Wasps
-Letizia Rivera: Zones in (Inter)Play. Reconceptualizing ecologies in Aristophanic Comedy.
12:30 – 13:45 Lunch
13:45 – 14:55 Panel 3 – More-than-human
-Thomas Lister: A Posthumanist Terence: Classicism Amidst the Grotesque
-Alexandra Meghji: Performing Scamander in Elizabeth Cook’s Achilles: Affective Ecologies beyond Humanism
-Olympia Glykioti: The aesthetics of animality in Theodoros Terzopoulos’ theatre: voice, body, sound and becoming-animal
14:55 – 15:05 Break
15:05 – 15:30 BADA Presentation
15:30 – 16:00 Day 1 Respondent: Emily Pillinger (KCL)
16:00– 16:15 Break
16:30 - 17:45 Guest Lecture: Vicky Angelaki (Mid Sweden University) ‘Contemporary Crises and the Classical Canon: Staging Intersectional Eco-Theatres’
18:00 – 19:30 Drinks Reception and Picnic Dinner at the Atrium of the Faculty of Classics (Ioannou Centre for Classical & Byzantine Studies, 66, St. Giles', Oxford, OX1 3LU - for directions, a map, and accessibility information please see the Ioannou Centre’s Access Guide)
Friday 4 July (Day 2) Royal Holloway
(Rehearsal Studio 2, Katharine Worth Building, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham Hill, Egham TW20 0BQ)
10.30-11.00 Tea and coffee, welcome
11.00 – 11:45 Panel 1 – Novels (Print, Performativity and Ecology)
-Thomas Barrett: Performance Ecologies in Print: Alexander the Great and the Bacchae in Mary Renault’s Fire from Heaven (1969)
-Nicolette D'Angelo: Love in the Time of Toxicity: Classical Reception and Queer/Trans Ecologies
11:45 – 12:00 Break
12:00 – 13:15 Panel 2 – The State and/or Nature
-Emma Louise Mendez Correa: Against the Family/State-Analogy: An Eco-Patriarchal Reading of Sophocles’ Oedipus
-Michele Di Bello: The Glade and the Cave: Natural Settings in Euripides’ Hypsipyle and Antiope
-Meredith Kerr: Digital Antigone(s): Ecologies of Catharsis in Theater of War’s Online & Hybrid Performances
13:15 – 14:15 Lunch
14:15 – 15:00 Panel 3 – Rewriting Iphigenia
-Roderick Zoe: Extinction, Cuts, and the Refusal of the Classical in Gary Owen’s Iphigenia in Splott (2015)
-Salome Joglidze: Rewriting Iphigenia in Aulis in a Georgian Sociopolitical Context
15:00 – 15:15 Break
15:15 – 15:45 Day 2 Respondent: Rhiannon Easterbrook (RHUL)
15:45 – 17.00 Plenary and drinks reception
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.
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 guest 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.
Call for papers
We are delighted to circulate our call for papers, the deadline for submitting abstracts has been extended to Friday 9 May.
Full details are included below, or can be downloaded as a PDF.
Contact for enquiries
Please email all enquiries to: postgradsymp@classics.ox.ac.uk