CRSN/ICS Summer Series 2026

Overlooked/Undercooked: Classical Reception in Colonial and Postcolonial Southeast Asia, convened by Leslie Wong (King’s College London)

Although the productive dialogue between classical reception studies and postcoloniality is now more than two decades old, some parts of the postcolonial world continue to receive less scholarly attention than others. Despite its long and troubled colonial history, Southeast Asia is perhaps the only major geographic region where both the colonial imposition and postcolonial appropriation of Graeco-Roman antiquity remain understudied. This begs the question of whether there has, all along, been a rich tradition of Southeast Asian classical reception that has merely been overlooked, or if that tradition is instead undercooked, and therefore too insubstantial to be of interest. The seminar series aims to explore and critically examine both possibilities without implying that either is necessarily true.

Bringing together speakers whose research interests and creative work span Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore, the proposed seminar series approaches the contested phenomenon of Southeast Asian classical reception from two angles simultaneously. Firstly, how have Southeast Asians from the advent of Euro-American colonialism to the present engaged with the legacies of ancient civilisations that they have historically had little to no contact with? And secondly, what foundational beliefs about itself does classical reception studies have to re-evaluate when it comes into contact with the non-existent disciplinary identity of Graeco-Roman “Classics” in Southeast Asia? Each speaker has grappled with the conundrum of teaching, explaining or contextualising “Classics” in relation to a region with multiple overlapping classical traditions and a modern population for whom ancient Greece and Rome are remote abstractions at best. These questions will recur across the series, even as each week’s speaker delves into different contexts of reception and reinvention.

Each of these papers will be held from 12:00pm to 13:30 online via Zoom. The titles, webpages, and Zoom links can be found below:

27 April
The Goddess Behind the Gorgon: Reclaiming the Colonial Monstrous Woman