Receptions and Critical Theory
This final research cluster is a significant concern of all our work across various specialisms in Classics. Classical reception studies is a multifaceted, ever-evolving and contested field, involving many different theoretical frameworks and methodologies, in which we consider all classical scholarship to be implicated. To the extent that it can be summed up, it is a mode of critical inquiry into the history, politics, ethics, idioms, preoccupations, possibilities and limits of Classics as a discipline.
Our work in this area is greatly stimulated by the department’s interactions with our adjacent departments of English and Comparative Literature, Philosophy, History, and the Centre for Renaissance Studies, and with Warwick’s renowned interdisciplinary centres, especially the Centre for Research into Philosophy, Literature and the Arts, the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender, and the Centre for the History of Medicine, Science and Technology.
Current projects include Classics in Relation, by Profs. Victoria Rimell and David Fearn (with Dr Tom Phillips, Manchester), an experimental book that attempts to enact new ways of relating to classical antiquity, classicism, and the discipline we call Classics, through a comparative, 21st-century lens; Victoria Rimell’s forthcoming monograph The Question of Grief. Seneca, Consolation and the Solace of Antiquity, which puts the political, ethical and cultural provocations of Roman Stoicism, in Latin, in conversation with modern theoretical and psychoanalytic orientations on grief, mourning, reparation, and the therapeutic encounter; Dr Joe Watson’s work on queer Classical reception in early-20th century literature, including a forthcoming edition, translation and commentary of C.P. Cavafy’s Poetical and Ethical Notes; and Liquid Knowledge, our Wellcome Trust-funded project led by Prof. Simon Swain, Prof. Caroline Petit and Dr Uwe Vangepohl, which investigates the impact of translations of Galen on uroscopic knowledge in the two most important medieval medical traditions, Arabic and Byzantine Greek.