Telling Bodies: A Conference on Corporeal Classical Reception – 2025 Leventis Conference

What happens if we centre the body in classical reception studies? What tales does the body tell? And what tales are told about the body?

In investigating narratives of embodiment and embodied narratives, we start from two assumptions. First, we take it that the body is no object: it participates in meaning-making. Second, a classic is no mere object either: for one thing, it comes into being through embodied practice.

The conference will focus on four areas of exploration in particular: definitions of the body and the classical (What is a body? What is a classic?); embodied cognition and the practice of reception (How does the body participate in classical reception?); classifying bodies and the classical body (How do bodies differ? How do differences relate to values, identities, and standards?); and bodily entanglements in worldmaking (How bounded are bodies?  How can ancient narratives help us conceive of human bodies and the environment as an entangled, continuous process?).