Posts by Helen Lovatt
Conference: Building Cohesion and Unity
November 29, 2017
Angeliki Roumpou announces a conference on combining approaches to the study of the past 2nd December A03 Humanities Building, The University of Nottingham, full details and registration available here The Department of Classics and the Department of Archaeology within the School of Humanities at the University of Nottingham have recently merged. The research students of …
Enoch Powell and the Classics
November 22, 2017
Gary Fisher on Herodotus, Enoch Powell, and Metaphors of Arboreal Rebirth ‘In that acropolis [of Athens] is a shrine of Erechtheus, called the “Earthborn,” and in the shrine are an olive tree and a pool of salt water. The story among the Athenians is that they were set there by Poseidon and Athena as tokens when …
Why remember the fallen?
November 15, 2017
A Perspective from Ancient Greece Edmund Stewart reflects on Remembrance Sunday and on teaching ancient Greek military history. By a happy coincidence, the lectures for first-year undergraduates at Nottingham on the topic of the Greeks at war have fallen before and after Remembrance Sunday. Such a coincidence provides ample room for reflection on how different …
Medea at the New Theatre
November 14, 2017
Lynn Fotheringham previews an on-campus Greek tragedy production The New Theatre production of Medea that I mentioned in my last blog-post opens tomorrow. I’ve been lucky enough to get to attend some of the rehearsals over the last fortnight, and to see the performance start coming together. Jazmine Greenaway probably has the most challenging job …
Willing migrants? An ancient Mediterranean perspective on forced labour
November 2, 2017
David Lewis discusses slavery and migration, ancient and modern. Ben Carson – Donald Trump’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development – has recently made yet another remarkable statement about US slavery. Speaking in Washington on March 6th 2017, Carson claimed that slaves travelling to the US in the holds of slave ships were migrants seeking …
November is Greek Myth Month
October 25, 2017
Lynn Fotheringham catalogues some upcoming Classics-related drama. There’s a remarkable concentration of Greek-mythology related drama coming up in November, both in Nottingham and elsewhere. I’ll start with the cinema before moving on to various theatrical productions. Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest film, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, is a modern take on the story of Agamemnon’s family …
The old pound coin goes out of circulation on Sunday – but what did the Romans do with old coinage?
October 13, 2017
A post by Notitngham PhD student Becky Batty, guest from Mint Imperials [English pound coin, 2008 – one for the archives!] If you’ve been in the UK over the past couple of months, you’re sure to have noticed the gradual disappearance of the ‘old’ pound. The new 12-sided pound coins have been slowly replacing the …
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk — or should that be Medea?
October 19, 2015
Helen Lovatt reflects on intertextuality and a trip to the opera (and continues to see Argonauts everywhere). Last week I experienced the theatrical pounding of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in a sensational and vivid production by the ENO. Get a flavour of it on youtube here. I do like a text that puts its …
Classical festivities in Edinburgh: A handy list
August 6, 2014
Lynn Fotheringham asks what’s on at the Edinburgh Festival this year and finds many interesting classical productions. For many years now my theatre-going has tended to focus on the Classics-related – not just performances of Greek drama; over my fifteen years in Nottingham, I remember Heaney’s Burial at Thebes and Berkoff’s Oedipus at the Playhouse, …
Pompeii: The Curious Case of the Body Casts
May 29, 2014
Katharina Lorenz asks why the casts made of bodies in Pompeii are so compelling (and so widespread in popular culture). I am not a great fan of sword-and-sandal films, I am afraid. The Life of Brian is about what I am comfortable encountering on the screen antiquity-wise; and when it comes to Ben Hur, admittedly …
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