Join us for two fantastic research talks from guest speakers Ferdinando Cocco and Orla Polten on how the form of animation can reveal the queerness always already present in the ancient Greco-Roman world.
Ferdinando Cocco will present a talk titled “Classics in a Time of Crisis: Barry JC Purves's Achilles and the Redemptive Work of Classical Reception during the Age of AIDS,” discussing how this Channel 4-distributed animated retelling of the Iliad mobilises the tactility of stop-motion practice to uncover the queerness always already at the heart of the Trojan epos. This will shine a light on the process on the very erotics of male same-sex intimacy, which had been rendered tragic by the onslaught of the AIDS crisis. The talk will be preceded by a screening of Purves’s film Achilles.
Dr. Polten will present a talk titled ‘Forgetting Home: Memory, Nostos, and Queer Temporalities in Ulysses 31’, asking why this French-Japanese 1980s adaptation of the Odyssey builds a world preoccupied with the forgetting, suspension, or abandonment of the journey home.
These two talks will be followed by Q&A, then a wine reception.