On June 13, 2026 at Corpus Christi, University of Oxford there will be a symposium honouring one of CRSN’s founding members, Lorna Hardwick. The programme, abstracts, and relevant information for the symposium can be found below:
This conference is free of charge to all participants, including lunch. Attendance is limited to 60 in person; there will also be an online option. Please sign up for the relevant option via a message to Dr Anastasia Bakogianni (a.bakogianni@massey.ac.nz) by 31 May, stating any dietary or other needs.
10.30-11.00: Arrive/register/coffee
Welcome and short introduction
Anastasia Bakogianni and Stephen Harrison (University of Oxford)
11:00-12:15 Panel 1
The Popular Turn in Classical Reception Studies: Challenges, Methods and Media
Anastasia Bakogianni and Luis Unceta Gómez (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)
This paper offers a collaboratively authored, dialogic reflection on the role of popular media in reshaping Classical Reception Studies, taking as its guiding inspiration the scholarship of Lorna Hardwick. Her work has consistently emphasised the fluidity, ethical complexity, and cross‑cultural dimensions of reception, providing a framework particularly suited to analysing today’s rapidly expanding landscape of popular culture.
We begin by engaging with the instability of “popular culture” as a term—its cultural contingency and methodological openness. The “popular turn” within Classical Reception has brought an extraordinary proliferation of media: film, comics, videogames, children’s and YA literature, immersive experiences, fan fiction, podcasts, and social media. Each medium introduces distinct methodological challenges and requires scholars to acquire new skills, encouraging an interdisciplinary ethos aligned with Hardwick’s call to democratise the field.
Through selected case studies, we explore the theoretical questions prompted by popular receptions: issues of agency, authenticity, audience participation, and cultural politics. Particular attention is given to multilingual and non‑Anglophone receptions. As scholars operating outside the native English‑speaking context, we highlight the importance of engaging with diverse cultural ecosystems and the productive complexities that arise when navigating multiple languages and media. Popular culture also plays a key pedagogical and democratic role. Its accessibility broadens the appeal of Classics, engages younger audiences, and challenges entrenched assumptions about elitism in the discipline. At the same time, its dynamism positions scholars in a state of continual learning—a “disciplinary uncomfortableness” that enriches Classical Reception by fostering curiosity, methodological innovation, and openness. We conclude by considering the future of the field. Like the Hydra invoked in recent discussions, popular culture continually generates new forms of reception, ensuring that Hardwick’s commitment to dialogue, interdisciplinarity, and critical reflexivity remains foundational for the next phases of Classical Reception Studies
12.15-1.30 Panel 2
Temporalities and Reception
Fiona Macintosh (University of Oxford) and Justine McConnell (King’s College London)
Classical reception makes the past present. But an artist’s reasons for re-creating antiquity, and their means of doing so, vary radically. Exploring three prominent modes of engagement with antiquity, this paper examines how time functions as a substrate of reception.
Receptions often ask their audiences to rethink the past, the present, or the future. To achieve this, temporal frames are deployed in ways that trouble the conceptualisation of time as linear and reach closer to a sense of mythic time as cyclical (Durkheim, Eliade) or spiralling (Frankétienne, Glissant). In juxtaposing time frames unexpectedly, whether via temporal gaps, or by elision, or by a syncretism in which multiple eras co-exist in one chronotope, creative artists play with the cyclical and the linear, inviting an interrogation of the canonicity of Classics even while they continue to mine it.
The case studies in this paper focus on what we term the ‘glitchy’ moments in receptions of antiquity and their potential for ‘gliding’ across multiple temporal and spatial levels beyond both the ancient and modern. These ‘glides’ often inspire awe or wonder in the reader/audience/onlooker making these ‘glitchy’ moments operate in analogous ways to the sublime, both in their loci and in their affects. In some ways, this is well-known in postcolonial discourse and the examples given in this paper are not surprisingly postcolonial and/or stridently countercultural, underlining how the defamiliarization of time and space can be key to destabilising coloniality in all its modalities.
1.30-2.15: Sandwich lunch (included)
2:15-3.30 Panel 3
Stop, Look and Listen: Paradigms of Reception panel
Joanna Paul (The Open University) and Henry Stead (St Andrews)
- How To Talk About Classical Reception (Joanna Paul)
Lorna Hardwick’s clear-sighted commitment to establishing and questioning the language and categories we use to talk about classical reception has been a central contribution to scholarship in this area. The new edition of her Reception Studies survey extends her concern with ‘connections and taxonomies’ and much of her work, whether addressing translation or democratisation, presences or contestation, has foregrounded reception terminology. In this paper, I take a cue from Hardwick’s illuminations of why language matters (as well as from other ongoing projects which assess reception’s language and metaphors) and begin with an overview of the rich tapestry of words and images that help us to describe reception in all its complexity. I then delve further into the implications of some of the most common tropes, with a particular focus on the sensorial engagements with antiquity that they employ. We value clear sight and illumination in our tendency to reach for visual paradigms, but what happens when we pay attention to the aural dimension of our relationship with the past? If we decide to listen rather than talk? Or if we linger in the shadows and keep reception out of the spotlight? Finally, I celebrate Hardwick’s achievements in making difficult concepts and theories accessible to a wide audience, and outline some of the challenges and opportunities we continue to face in putting reception at the heart of a Classical Studies pedagogy. - Red Lamps and Shades of Reception (Henry Stead)
Running with the visual paradigm, ideologically coloured interpretations of antiquity have been frequently met with accusations of distortion, not least Marxist readings during the Cold War. According to the creaky scholarly conventions of neutrality and objectivity, visible (usually because non-dominant) ideologies are supposed to blur our vision of antiquity. Explicitly because their ideas are or were countercultural, the interpretations / receptions of revolutionaries, radicals and subterraneans of all species and persuasion, cast an unusually vital, vivid and penetrating light back on antiquity.
This paper will probe, à la Hardwick, the feted dialogue between ancient and modern, and pause to consider the interface between ‘the modern’ and ‘the now’ with a special focus on the ‘red lens’ of British communist receptions of antiquity before 1956.
3:30-4:15 Tea
4.15 – 5.30: Panel 4
Towards a Sociology of Classical Reception
Christopher Stray (Swansea University)
At school I was taught by a pupil of T. R. Glover and a pupil of Malcom Willcock. At Cambridge I was taught by Willcock, and then by Moses Finley, whom I later joined on the JACT Ancient History Committee. My MSc thesis provided an ethnography of Classics teaching in local schools; my PhD thesis (1994), revised as Classics Transformed (1998), offered an analysis of Classics as a form of social action which deployed ideas of the classical past to cope with present discontents by invoking ‘eternal values’ to resist change and relativism. In my talk I discuss the use of sociology in studies of Classical Reception, in particular, at the institutional level, including the reception field itself. I also offer an autocritique of my own work in the field. I hope this will add a strand to the conversation that Lorna Hardwick has done so much to stimulate.
Beyond Allusion
Elizabeth Vandiver (Whitman College)
I will begin with brief autobiographical remarks on the development of my own work on Classical Reception, since in some ways my trajectory from simple allusion-tracking to a much more expanded definition of Reception has paralleled the development of the field itself over the past two decades, and since that trajectory owes a very great deal to Lorna’s advice, example, and mentorship. I will then pose some questions about future directions of Reception Studies, which I hope will be taken up in discussion; these will focus mainly on the distinction between author-originated and reader-activated reception. These two forms of reception both involve responses to a classical text, but they operate very differently and lend themselves to very different forms of analysis which yield quite distinct types of insight into the texts (ancient and modern). I will discuss both kinds of reception, drawing on my own work for examples.
5:30: Concluding thoughts
Stephen Harrison
5:45-6:15 Final drinks and celebration