Institute of Greece, Rome and The Classical Tradition
Current Fellows
Dr Emily Pillinger (Vice-Chancellor's Centenary Fellow)
Dr Pillinger has travelled back and forth across the Atlantic before moving to Bristol this year. After studying Classics as an undergraduate at New College, Oxford, she moved to the wilds of Vermont for two years to teach classical languages and literature as part of the liberal arts programme at Marlboro College. She then moved to New Jersey where she gained her MA and PhD from Princeton University. She has now joined the Institute of Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition at Bristol for a year as the Vice-Chancellor’s Centenary Fellow.
She has broad interests in both Greek and Latin literature, and has written on texts ranging from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon through to the nineteenth century opera Les Troyens by Berlioz. Her research investigates how readers and writers through the ages have constructed the idea of ‘classical literature’, and how classical texts either embrace or resist these traditional models of canon-formation. She is particularly interested in the ways in which the temporal and spatial dynamics of ancient poetry challenge the distinctions conventionally used in literary criticism: distinctions such as those marked between author and critic, fictional and historical narrative, or written and performed text. During her year in Bristol, Dr Pillinger will be revising for publication her dissertation Great Expectations: The Poetry and Poetics of Inspired Prophecy, and will begin work on a new project provisionally called Epistles and Epigraphy: The Task of the Accidental Reader, which focuses on some of the unique dynamics of poetic production in Imperial Rome.
Dr Kate Nichols (Henry Moore Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow)
Kate Nichols completed her PhD, 'Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace, 1854-1936', in September 2009, at Birkbeck College, London's School of History, Classics and Archaeology. As Henry Moore Foundation postdoctoral fellow at Bristol's Institute of Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition, she will be developing her thesis into a new research project, 'Mass audiences for classical sculpture'. The project uses a range of case studies (including the Crystal Palace) to discuss the social and cultural context of nineteenth-century display of classical antiquities. What happens to the supposedly elite status of classical sculpture once it is readily available to all? How does its status change when exhibited not alongside other 'museum objects' but consumer goods and spectacular entertainments? And how has the display of sculpture in the past contributed to our understanding of it today? She is particularly interested in how sculpture figures in debates over design reform, taste, beauty and morality, issues surrounding the 'appropriation' of classical images, and ideas about ancient and modern democracy.
Dr Stephen D’Evelyn (Cassamarca Fellow in Latin Language & Literature and its Reception)
Dr D’Evelyn is a Medieval Latinist, who studied previously at Brown University in Rhode Island. His current research involves reading the poetry of Catullus, Horace, and Venantius Fortunatus in the light of ancient and modern gift-theory, which helps interpret practices ranging from patronage and religious sacrifice to the exchange of gifts between lovers. An edition with commentary on Hildegard of Bingen's Symphonia, in which he shows what sources Hildegard read in composing her lyrics and how those lyrics relate to her oeuvre, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Past Fellows
2005-6
Dr Henry Power (Donor’s Fellow), working on 18th-century epic and novel and on Cowley and Virgil.
Dr Power is now Lecturer in English at the University of Exeter, and is working on articles and a monograph on the reception of Virgil in the English Civil War; he is also contributing a chapter on the English novel to the forthcoming Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, 1660-1780, edited by Charles Martindale and David Hopkins and a chapter on Virgil and Milton in the new Blackwell Companion to Milton, edited by Joseph Farrell and Michael Putnam.
Dr Liz Potter (Leventis Fellow), ‘The reception of Athenian democracy in the long nineteenth century.’
2004-5
Dr Katherine Harloe (Leventis Fellow), ‘Nietzsche and the Greeks’
Dr Harloe is now Lecturer in Classics at the University of Reading, having also held a postdoctoral fellowship in Oxford after leaving Bristol; she has published articles on classical reception in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophy, and is co-editing (with Neville Morley) the papers from the 2007 workshops on the modern reception of Thucydides.
2003-4
Dr Isobel Hurst, ‘Homer in 19th-century English literature by women writers.’
Since leaving Bristol, Dr Hurst has taught at Oxford and Warwick, and is now Lecturer in English at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her book Victorian Women Writers and the Classics was published by OUP in 2006.
Dr Stefano-Maria Evangelista, ‘Classics and modernism’.
Following his year in Bristol, Dr Evangelista was appointed to a 4-year fellowship at Merton College, Oxford, and is now CUF Lecturer in the Faculty of English and Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford.
2002-3
Dr Paul Botley, ‘Learning Greek in the Renaissance’
Dr Botley is currently a postdoctoral fellow with the Scaliger Project at the Warburg Institute. His book, Greek Translation in the Renaissance, was published by CUP in 2004
Dr Alexandra Lianeri (Leventis Fellow): ‘The idea and ideal of Democracy. The ancient Greek Concept of Democracy in English Translations’
Dr Lianeri co-organised a conference on ‘Translation and the Classic’ with Vanda Zajko, papers from which have now been published as Translation and the Classic: identity as change in the history of culture (OUP, 2008). After leaving Bristol she held the Moses & Mary Finley Fellowship at Darwin College, Cambridge, and has recently been appointed to a permanent position at Thessaloniki.
2001-2
Dr Alexandra Lianeri (see above; appointed for two years)
Dr Christos Nifadopoulos (Leventis Fellow): Authority and Ancient Education
Dr Nifadopoulos edited Etymologia: Studies in Ancient Etymology (Münster, 2003)
2000-1
Dr Genevieve Liveley: ‘The Poet and the Women: feminist responses to Ovid’
Dr Lively is now Lecturer in Classics at Bristol. Her book Ovid: Love Songs was published by Duckworth in 2005, and she has also published a number of articles on the Metamorphoses and on the reception of Ovid.
Dr Frisbee Sheffield (Leventis Fellow): ‘Eros and Philosophy in Plato's Symposium’
Dr Sheffield's book Plato's Symposium: the ethics of desire (OUP) was published in 2006, as was the co-edited volume Plato's Symposium: issues in interpretation and reception (Harvard).