Scholarship and/as the Postclassical

Postgraduate and Early Career Workshop

  • June 29-30, 2014
  • Ioannou Centre, University of Oxford

After two earlier workshops on Postclassicism (Princeton, January 2013) and on Untimeliness (Cambridge, June 2014), our third workshop asks how knowledge of the ancient world is and has been produced within the framework of the discipline of Classical Studies itself.

On the one hand, this means asking questions about how classicists and institutions have organized their objects of study, what they have privileged and valued, what categories, parameters and practices they have employed and how this has interacted with the role and perception of the scholar itself. If, in addition, we think about the institutionalization of classical knowledge as a phenomenon that has to do with perceptions of modernity, then what are its relations both to earlier and alternative forms of classical knowing?

On the other hand, the question arises of how and why we are doing disciplinary history, a field of inquiry whose parameters are not self-evident, much as there has been a traditional focus on the prosopography of scholarship, on case studies, and on institutional history. Can postclassicism offer us a chance to rethink earlier categories both within the discipline and of the discipline? How are those two approaches linked? In other words: what does a view on scholarship as the postclassical do for the classicist?

We are envisaging a two-day workshop of twenty-minute papers (possibly pre-circulated), with respondents and maximum time for discussion. We also plan on a shared “atelier”-style session for which we would focus discussion on one text from the history of scholarship – a good candidate for this seems Sebastiano Timpanaro’s The Genesis of Lachmann’s Method (available in English edition and translation).

Schedule

Sunday, June 29

10.00-10:30
Coffee

10.30
Fran Middleton (Cambridge): “Byzantine Manuscripts of the Batrachomyomachia and the Construction of Textuality”
Response: Matt Hosty (Oxford)

11.15
Fabio Pagani (Pisa): “Bessarion, Poliziano and the Indirect Transmission’
Response: Amanda Klause (Princeton)

12.00
Rachael White (Oxford): “Classics and the Founding of Sydney and Melbourne Universities”
Response: Helen van Noorden (Cambridge)

12.45-1.15
Lunch

1.15
Niki Karapanagioti (Reading): ‘The Development of Classics as a Discipline in 19th-century Greece: Translating Herodotus”
Response: George Kazantzidis (Oxford)

2.00
Brendan Green (Princeton): ‘The Discovery of Palmyra and its Impact on Classics”
Response: Lydia Matthews (Leicester/Oxford)

2.45-3.15
Tea

3.15
David Butterfield (Cambridge): ‘The History of Philology”
Response: Andrea Placidi (Princeton)

4.00
Almut Fries (Oxford): “A Byzantine Scholar at Work: Demetrius Triclinius and Separated Strophic Responsion in Tragedy and Aristophanes”
Response: Fran Middleton (Cambridge)

4.45-6.00
Chris Stray (Swansea): “Disciplinary Histories of Classics”

6.00
Drinks

7.00
Dinner

 

Monday, June 30th

9.30
Hamutal Minkowich (UCL): “‘Historical Psychology’: Whose Task and What For?”
Response: Jessica Wright (Princeton)

10.15
Claire Jackson (Cambridge): “Can Romance Progress? The Ancient Novel, Fiction, and Classical Reception”
Response: Dan Jolowicz (Oxford)

11.00-11.30
Coffee

11.30
Noah Levin (Princeton): “Nietzsche’s ‘Wir Philologen'”
Response: Tom Phillips (Oxford)

12.15
Helen Slaney (Oxford): ‘Time Travellers: Ancient Sites and Embodied Knowledge”
Response: Rosa Andújar (UCL)

1.00-2.00
Lunch

2.00
Emma Cole (UCL): ‘Scholarly Attitudes towards Practitioner Interpretations of the Poetics; Or, Hands Off Our Discipline!”
Response: Lucy Jackson (Oxford)

2.45
Clare Foster (Cambridge): ‘‘Classics’ as the Nomenclature of Survival: The Cambridge 1921 Oresteia”
Response: Luke Richardson (UCL)

3.15-3.45
Tea

3.45
Paul Touyz (Princeton): “Goethe and the Historiography of the Satyr Play”
Response: Adam Lecznar (Bristol)

4.30
Lucy Jackson (Oxford)
Response: Clare Foster (Cambridge)

5.15
Closing Discussion