Reconstructing Classics – voice

Part 2 of a review of Confronting Classics, by Mary Beard [Link]. Some tactics for challenging the orthodox monologue of academic Classical Studies and opening space to hear other voices. What is Classical Studies about? Mary Beard argues that Classics is not about ancient Greece and Rome at all, but about what happens in the…

memory and return – Tri Bywyd (Three Lives) 1995

On the return of the past: document, memory, and archive. Katie Pearl (theatre director and professor at Wesleyan – see her extraordinary work here – [Link]) recently got in touch asking about the performance in Wales in 1995 of Tri Bywyd (translation – Three Lives), a work of theatre/archaeology by arts company Brith Gof. Specifically…

Confronting the Classics

Project Greece and Rome – [Link] Classics is the study of Ancient Greece and Rome. Or is it? Mary Beard, Cambridge University Professor, the popular “Oxbridge Don“ of the British media, deals with the question of the object of Classics in her book Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures, and Innovations (Liveright 2013). I had a…

Update – the actuality of the archaeological past

I have contributed little to this site Since 2016. I have been writing (Greece and Rome: a new model of antiquity [Link]), running experiments in fieldwork (Project Borderlands [Link]), exploring applied archaeology (with a host of organizations and corporations), asking questions of the proper role of the academic, the researcher, the scholar. In this contemporary…

materiality of the invisible

Yesterday I had the great honor to open a remarkable exhibition of artworks at the Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht – multiform institute for fine art, design and reflection Curators: Lex ter Braak, Director of Van Eyck and Huib Haye van der Werf, Head of Artistic Program. The exhibition runs through The Van Eyck Academie, Marres,…