Keynote Speakers:  

Professor Andrew Benjamin (Monash University)

Professor Page Du Bois (University of California, San Diego)

Professor Simon Goldhill (University of Cambridge)

Professor Lorna Hardwick (Open University)

Professor Stanley Lombardo (University of Kansas)

Dr Margaret Reynolds (Queen Mary’s College, University of London)

Professor Peter Snow (Monash University) 

Invited Presenters

Helen Eastman (Artistic Director, Onassis Programme, University of Oxford)

Luke Mullins (Writer/Performer, Irony is not enough.)

The creative team of Sappho...in 9 fragments.

The Conference

To coincide with Malthouse Theatre’s staging of the play Sappho...in 9 fragments, Monash University, the Victorian College of Arts and Music and the Australasian Classical Reception Studies Network are hosting a 3 day interdisciplinary conference on the relationship between performance and the Classics. The conference will bring together Classical scholarship, theatre studies, translation studies and cultural studies to investigate how performance manipulates and embodies our understanding of the classical world. 

Using the figure of Sappho as a metaphor for the many gaps we have to fill as we grapple with the otherness of the ancient world, the conference will explore how readers, translators, performers and spectators endlessly recreate the Classics in our imaginations and our embodiments.  

Call for papers

Abstracts are invited for papers/presentations/performances exploring all aspects of the interrelationship between Ancient Greece and Rome and performance. Please note that, while papers on Sappho will be welcomed, the conference is in no way limited to Sappho scholarship, and papers on all aspects of performance and classical reception are invited. 

Proposed panel topics currently include:

• Embodying the gaps in the mind’s eye: reading as performance
• Audience, affect, tragedy
• Rhythms of reception
• Acting reception: performance as a route to reception, or as reception in its own right?
• Who’s/Whose author? The multiple ‘authorship’ of adaptations of the Classics
• Weeping stones and bleeding shells: from Niobe to Hypatia
• Nationalism, translation, reception: Classics and cultural sensitivities
• Performance as Research/ Research as Performance

The convenors welcome suggestions for other panels.

Submission of Abstracts

Abstracts of up to one page in length are now invited for submission.  

Please follow these guidelines below for details of how to submit your abstract:

The abstract should be in the following format:

1. saved as an A4 sized file (not letter size); 

2. margins of 1” (2.54 cm) all round; 

3. title of paper centred top 14 pt font; 

4. followed on alternate lines by: your name, institutional affiliation, e-mail address (valid for a further year); all centred, 12 pt font; 

5. body of text in a minimum 12 pt font; fully justified; 

6. contributors should include a short biographical note, of not exceeding 5 lines in length.

Please send your abstract to: 

jane.griffiths@arts.monash.edu.au

The deadline for submission of abstracts is Friday March 26th 2010..  

Contributors will be advised of the outcome of their submission in late April.

Publication:

Selected conference proceedings will be published. Details are to follow.

Conference convenors: 

Dr Jane Montgomery Griffiths, Monash University 

Paul Monaghan, Victorian College of the Arts and Music, University of Melbourne

Dr Alastair Blanshard, University of Sydney, ACSRN

Conference Website: A conference website will be available shortly. Please follow links on http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/ecps/conferences/ for further details.

All enquiries to:

jane.griffiths@arts.monash.edu.au 

Classical Association of Victoria  

This conference is generously supported by the Australian Research Council as part of the Monash/Malthouse Linkage Project ‘Staging Sappho: investigating new methodologies in performance reception. Our thanks too to Classical Association of Victoria and Malthouse Theatre.