Classical Reception Workshop
Since 2010, the Classical Receptions Workshop has been bringing together faculty and graduate students working in Classics, Political Science, English, Art History, Theatre, and other relevant fields to engage with external speakers and discuss pre-circulated readings pertaining to the reception of Classics materials in post-Classical times.
“Classical reception studies” is a fast-growing area of academic inquiry in Classics and in the humanities broadly that focuses on the recovery and examination of the ways in which aspects of iconic Greek and Roman sources (texts, images, material objects, figures, practices) have been utilized by post-antiquity actors to make meaning in and for their own times (later-antiquity to contemporary times).
Reception studies open up our awareness about how we constantly re-create the past and about the complex epistemological status of "ancient" sources. Sometimes referred to as the study of the “afterlife” of classical antiquity, the field addresses patterns of reception across languages, media and geographic boundaries. The field is rooted in Classics because study of engagements with the record of Greece and Rome is its defining feature. Methodologically, its scholarly practice journeys into other academic fields, producing work distinctive for its trans- or multi-disciplinary character.
Our group also oversees the Classicizing Chicago Project, an investigation of the scattered traces of a changing, sometimes antagonistic, but always keen relationship with the Greek and Roman past evident in Chicago history. The Classicizing Chicago Project is building a digital archive of examples of this cultural mingling across time and space, and a collection of interpretative materials of interest to scholars, students, teachers, and the general public.
Undergraduate curricular initiatives in Classical reception are collected in the “Classical Traditions” course list.
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