̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Simon Goldhill

̽��ֱ��queer men of H staircase

cjb250 — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 09:00:26 +0000

For the past 300 years, the Gibbs Building at King’s College, Cambridge, has been home to many of history’s most influential characters. A new book explores the hidden – and in many cases, not-so-hidden – stories of some of its queer fellows.

Living in a material world: why 'things' matter

lw355 — Wed, 18 Oct 2017 08:00:59 +0000

From the tools we work with to the eyeglasses and dental implants that improve us, our bodies are shaped by the things we use. We express and understand our identities through clothing, cars and hobbies. We create daily routines and relate to each other through houses and workplaces. We imagine place, history and political regimens through sculptures and paintings.

Even when we think we are dealing with abstract information, the form it takes makes a huge difference. When printing liberated the written word from the limited circulation of handwritten manuscripts, the book and the newspaper became fundamental to religious and political changes, and helped create the modern world.

Studies of material culture focus upon things not just as material objects, but also on how they reflect our meanings and uses. Throughout the humanities and social sciences, there is a long tradition of thinking principally about meaning and human intention, but scholars are now realising the immense importance of material things in social life.

At the core of material culture studies is the question of how people and things interact. This is a simple, sweeping question, but one long overlooked, thanks to historically dominant philosophical traditions that focus narrowly on human intention. In fact, it’s only in the past decade that scholars have posed the question of material agency – how things structure human lives and action.

Material culture studies have emerged as central in many disciplines across the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. In archaeology and history, scholars see material objects as fundamental sources for the human past, counterbalancing the discourse-oriented view that written texts give us. Should we use historical sources to see what people think they ate, or count their rubbish to find out what they really consumed? Combining the two gives us answers of unprecedented scope.

Geographers ask why it makes a difference whether workplaces are organised into separate offices or open-plan cubicles. Literary scholars draw attention to how experience and meaning are built around things, like Marcel Proust’s remembering of things long past as a madeleine cake is dipped in tea; even books themselves are artefacts of a singular and powerful kind. Likewise, studying anatomical models and astronomical instruments empowers an understanding of the history of science as a practical activity. And anthropologists explore the capacity of art to cross cultures and express the claims of indigenous peoples.

Material things are also at the heart of new fields such as heritage studies. Memory itself is material, as we’ve seen recently in the USA, where whether to keep or tear down statues of historic figures such as Confederate generals can polarise people.

Unlike most newly emerging fields in the sciences, material culture studies are grounded in a sprawling panoply of related approaches rather than in a tightly focused paradigm. They come from a convergence of archaeology, anthropology, history, geography, literary studies, economics and many other disciplines, each with its own methods for approaching human–thing interactions.

̽��ֱ��reasons for this interest are not hard to find. ̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� offers a rare combination of three essential foundations for the field. One is world-class strength in the humanities and social sciences, sustained by institutions like the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), an essential venue for interdisciplinary collaboration as shown by its 'Things' seminar series (see panel).

Most human dilemmas are material dilemmas in some way

̽��ֱ��second is the capacity for a huge range of scientific analyses of materials. ̽��ֱ��third is our immensely varied museum collections: the Fitzwilliam Museum’s treasures; the Museum of Classical Archaeology’s 19th-century cast gallery; the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology’s worldwide prehistoric, historic and ethnographic collections; and many others. Where else can scholars interested in the material aspect of Victorian collecting study Darwin’s original finches or Sedgwick’s and Scilla’s original fossils, boxes, labels, archives and all?

Whether it’s work on historic costume, craft production, religion or books, the study of material culture offers unparalleled insights into how humans form their identities, use their skills and create a sense of place and history.

But it is not only a descriptive and historical field. Most human dilemmas are material dilemmas in some way. Where did our desire for things come from and how did the economics of consumerism develop? How can we organise our daily lives to reduce our dependence on cars? Should we care where the objects we buy come from before they reach the supermarket shelves? How do repatriation claims grow out of the entangled histories of museum objects?

̽��ֱ��shape of this new field is still emerging, but Cambridge research will be at the heart of it.

Professor John Robb is at the Department of Archaeology, Professor Simon Goldhill is at the Faculty of Classics, Professor Ulinka Rublack is at the Faculty of History and Professor Nicholas Thomas is at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

Things structure our lives. They enrich us, embellish us and express our hopes and fears. Here, to introduce a month-long focus on research on material culture, four academics from different disciplines explain why understanding how we interact with our material world can reveal unparalleled insights into what it is to be human.

Studies of material culture focus upon things not just as material objects, but also on how they reflect our meanings and uses.

John Robb, Simon Goldhill, Ulinka Rublack, Nicholas Thomas

Harlow Heslop

All the things

Curious objects and CRASSH courses

You’ve had a difficult time lately. You’re thinking that all this bad luck might be more than coincidence. You trim your nails, snip some hair and bend a couple of pins. You put them in a bottle with a dash of urine, heat it up and put it in a wall. That’ll cure the bewitchment, you say to yourself.

Making a ‘witch bottle’ like this would be an entirely reasonable thing to do 400 years ago. It would also be reasonable to swallow a stone from a goat’s stomach to counteract poisoning and hide an old shoe in a chimney breast to increase the chance of conceiving.

“All of these objects took on layers of meaning for their owners, and the fact these strong connections existed at all gives us glimpses of people’s beliefs, hopes and lives,” says Annie Thwaite, a PhD student in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. She is also one of the convenors of a seminar series on ‘Things’ at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH).

“Material culture was a crucial part of medicine in the 17th century. Objects like witch bottles are often dismissed as ‘folkish’. But by investigating the bottles’ architectural and geographical situation, their material properties and processes, you start to look through the eyes of their owners. Fearful of supernatural intrusion into their homes and bodies, people would go to great efforts to use something they regarded as a legitimate element of early modern medical practice.”

Charms and amulets, votives and potions, myths and magic will be discussed as this year’s ‘Things’ seminars begins a new focus on imaginative objects.

“Like material culture studies, the seminar series is broad and varied,” she explains. “We might just as easily examine the skills required to craft objects as the power of objects to become politicised.

“Things matter greatly to humans. We have short lives and our stuff outlives us. While we can’t tell our own story, maybe they can.”

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Inaugural $100,000 Nine Dots Prize winner chosen from more than 700 worldwide entries

sjr81 — Wed, 31 May 2017 08:51:20 +0000

Up against competition from over 700 other entrants from around the world, Williams’ 3,000-word answer to the set question ‘Are digital technologies making politics impossible?’ was deemed the most original and innovative by the ten-strong Board of leading academics, journalists and thinkers.

His entry Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Persuasion in the Attention Economy argues that digital technologies are making all forms of politics worth having impossible as they privilege our impulses over our intentions and are ‘designed to exploit our psychological vulnerabilities in order to direct us toward goals that may or may not align with our own’. He covers:

How the ‘distractions’ produced by digital technologies are much more profound than minor ‘annoyances’
How so-called ‘persuasive’ design is undermining the human will and ‘militating against the possibility of all forms of self-determination’
How beginning to ‘assert and defend our freedom of attention’ is an urgent moral and political task

As well as the US$100,000 prize money, Williams has been awarded a book deal with Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press for a book in which he will develop his ideas on this topic. He will be supported by the editorial team at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press and will spend a term at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), Cambridge ̽��ֱ��.

Born in Cape Canaveral, Florida and raised in Texas, Williams is currently a doctoral candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute and Balliol College, Oxford, where he researches the philosophy and ethics of attention and persuasion as they relate to technology design. He is also a member of the Digital Ethics Lab at Oxford and a visiting researcher at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. Prior to that he worked for over ten years at Google, where he received the Founders’ Award – the company’s highest honour – for his work on advertising products and tools. He is also a co-founder of the Time Well Spent campaign, a project that aims to steer technology design towards having greater respect for users’ attention. He holds a master’s in design engineering from the ̽��ֱ�� of Washington and as an undergraduate studied literature at Seattle Pacific ̽��ֱ��.

On being awarded the Prize, Williams said: “I'm honoured, grateful, heartened, energised and overjoyed to have won this opportunity. I know that many others thought deeply about this question and put substantial time, attention and care into answering it. I'm looking forward to getting to work on producing a book that is worthy of the competition.

“As Neil Postman pointed out in the 1980s, we’re far more attuned to Orwellian threats to freedom such as coercion and force, than to the subtler, more indirect threats of persuasion or manipulation of the sort Aldous Huxley warned us about when he predicted that it’s not what we fear but what we desire that will control us. Yet today these Huxleyan threats pose the far greater risk, and I’m extremely encouraged that the Nine Dots Prize Board has chosen to give its attention to these pressing matters. Their important question is not only compelling but also timely, and this competition is a fascinating and original way of putting such a crucial subject on the societal radar.”

̽��ֱ��Nine Dots Prize was established to promote and encourage innovative thinking to address problems facing the modern world. It is judged anonymously by a Board chaired by Professor Simon Goldhill, Director of CRASSH.

Professor Goldhill said: “This competition was uniquely exciting: all the entries were anonymous, and we had no idea whether we were reading the proposal of a professor, a novelist, a postman, a student or a lawyer. It turned out afterwards we had plenty of all of these among our more than 700 applications. We aimed to discover a new voice, and luckily we have: an as-yet unpublished individual with experience of the tech industry and of academia.

"There were several proposals that the Board felt would make excellent books, but we think we have the best – and we hope that a really lively public debate will follow its publication. ̽��ֱ��issue it addresses is hugely important, and this is a new and thrilling way of starting such a discussion.”

̽��ֱ��Nine Dots Prize Board is composed of ten internationally recognised and distinguished academics, authors, journalists and thinkers. They are:

Professor Diane Coyle – Professor of Economics at Manchester ̽��ֱ��, former Vice Chair of the BBC Trust and Economics Editor of the Independent
Professor Paul Gilroy – currently Professor of English at Kings College London, previously Giddens Professor of Social Theory at the London School of Economics
Professor Simon Goldhill (Chair) – Director of the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), Professor in Greek Literature and Culture and Fellow of King's College, Cambridge
E.J. Graff – Managing Editor of the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog and Senior Fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis ̽��ֱ��
Professor Alcinda Honwana – visiting Professor of Anthropology and International Development at the Open ̽��ֱ�� and formerly was a program officer at the United Nations Office of the Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict
Peter Kadas – Director of the Kadas Prize Foundation
Professor Ira Katznelson – President of the Social Science Research Council and former President of the American Political Science Association
Professor Roger Martin – Institute Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute and the Michael Lee-Chin Family Institute for Corporate Citizenship at the Rotman School of Management and the Premier’s Chair in Productivity & Competitiveness
Professor Riccardo Rebonato – Professor of Finance at EDHEC Business School, formerly Global Head of Rates and FX Research at PIMCO
Professor David Runciman – Professor of Politics and Head of the Department of Politics and International Studies at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

James Williams, a 35-year-old doctoral candidate researching design ethics at Oxford ̽��ֱ��, has been announced as the inaugural winner of the $100,000 Nine Dots Prize at an awards ceremony at the British Library yesterday evening.

We had no idea whether we were reading the proposal of a professor, a novelist, a postman, a student or a lawyer.

Simon Goldhill

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Celebrating 10 years of European research excellence

ag236 — Mon, 13 Mar 2017 12:40:43 +0000

When European government representatives met in Lisbon in the year 2000, and expressed an aspiration that Europe should become the world's leading knowledge economy by 2010, they agreed on the need to create a body to “fund and co-ordinate basic research at European level”.

This was the impetus underlying the creation, in 2007, of the European Research Council (ERC).

Ten years after its foundation, the ERC has become a European success story. It has supported some 6,500 projects through its prestigious grants, and has become a unique model for the fostering and funding of innovative academic research.

To mark the anniversary, events are being held across Europe during ERC Week, running from 13-19 March. At the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, various recipients of ERC grants will be sharing their findings with a wide audience in talks scheduled as part of the Cambridge Science Festival.

̽��ֱ��McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research will be joining in ERC Week celebrations by hosting a conference on Thursday, 16 March.

On the same day, a reception for Cambridge recipients of ERC grants, attended by ERC president Prof. Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, will be held at the Fitzwilliam Museum, which is currently showing the ERC-supported exhibition, “Madonnas and Miracles: ̽��ֱ��Holy Home in Renaissance Italy”.

̽��ֱ��ERC supports outstanding researchers in all fields of science and scholarship. It awards three types of research awards (Starter, Consolidator, Advanced) through a competitive, peer-reviewed process that rewards excellence. Its focus on “frontier research” allows academics to develop innovative and far-reaching projects over five-year periods.

̽��ֱ��United Kingdom has been the largest recipient of ERC awards –between 2007 and 2015, it received 24% of all ERC funding.

To date, the ERC has supported 1524 projects by UK-based academics. Researchers at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge have won 218 of those grants, in fields ranging from Astronomy to Zoology.

“What is special about an ERC grant?”, asks Dr Marta Mirazón Lahr, who was awarded an ERC Advanced Investigator Award for her project “IN-AFRICA”, which examines the evolution of modern humans in East Africa.

“An obvious side is that it’s a lot of money. But I think it’s more than just the money. Because it’s five years, the ERC grant allows you to get a group and build a real community around the project. It also allows you to explore things in greater depth.”

An ERC grant allowed Dr Debora Sijacki, at the Institute of Astronomy, to attract “a really competitive and international team, which otherwise would have been almost impossible to get.”

Being funded for a five-year period, she adds, “gives you time to expand and really tackle some of the major problems in astrophysics, rather than doing incremental research.”

It also allowed her access to facilities: “In my case, it was access to world-leading supercomputers. And without the ERC grant this would have been difficult.”

“Real progress in research is made when researchers can tackle big important questions," says Prof David Baulcombe, of the Department of Plant Sciences, the recipient of two ERC grants. " ̽��ֱ��ERC programme invites researchers to submit ambitious, blue-skies, imaginative proposals. There aren’t many others sources of funding that allow one to do that sort a thing.”

Dr Christos Lynteris, of the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH), is the recipient of an ERC Starting Grant for his project “Visual representations of the third plague pandemic.

“An ERC is a unique opportunity," he says: “it fosters interdisciplinary work. It also fosters analytical tools and the creation of new methods.”

“It offers a great opportunity to work with other people, over a period of 5 years, which is something very unusual, and with quite a liberal framework, so you are able to change and shift your questions, to reformulate them. For me, it means freedom, above everything.”

For Prof. Ottoline Leyser, Director of the Sainsbury Laboratory, it is the “ERC ethos” and its “emphasis on taking things in new directions” that has made all the difference.

̽��ֱ��ERC values an innovative, risk-taking approach “in a way that conventional grant-funding schemes don’t –they usually want to see that slow build rather than the risky step into the unknown.”

Prof. Simon Goldhill, Director of CRASSH, was awarded an ERC Advanced Investigator Award for his project “Bible and Antiquity in 19th Century Culture”. It has given him “the unique opportunity to do a genuinely interdisciplinary collaborative project with the time and space it takes to make such interdisciplinarity work.”

“Most importantly,” he adds, “the financial model offered by this sort of project enables us to do work that is 15 or 20 years ahead of the rest of the world, and Britain and Europe are all the stronger for it.”

̽��ֱ��sentiment is echoed by Prof. Ruth Cameron, of the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy. ̽��ֱ��impact of an ERC grant for her project “3D Engineered Environments for Regenerative Medicine” has, she says, “exceeded expectations”.

So what has the ERC ever done for us? Quite a lot, say Cambridge academics, as they mark the 10th anniversary of Europe’s premier research-funding body

̽��ֱ��financial model offered by this sort of project enables us to do work that is 15 or 20 years ahead of the rest of the world. Britain and Europe are all the stronger for it.

Prof. Simon Goldhill, CRASSH

Cambridge & the ERC: 10 years of research excellence

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Past versus present in an age of progress: the Victorians

lw355 — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 12:00:33 +0000

It was the age of industrialisation and political revolution, compulsory education and the dominance of the novel, the start of the postal service and the invention of the train, the excitement of evangelical Christianity and the critical challenge to the authorities of the past. Above all, it was an era that knew it was a time like no other, a time of radical progress and visionary reform. As the Victorians were forging remarkable economic and technological innovations, they were also obsessed with understanding their own history. In archaeology, geology, history, theology and evolutionary biology, how the past was understood was revolutionising the present – and shaping the future in which we now live.

For the past five years, a project funded by the Leverhulme Trust has taken a fresh look at the development and impact of the competing views of the past in 19th-century Britain. ‘Past versus Present: Abandoning the Past in an Age of Progress’, a project carried out by the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group, has broken new ground in transcending the disciplinary boundaries that are themselves an intellectual legacy of the Victorians.

It has proved to be a wonderful experience for all concerned, and a model of how productive and exciting a long-term interdisciplinary project can be. Each member of the project has found their work developing and expanding its horizons, and the group has provided a remarkably supportive space for exploring the richness of Victorian culture. Historians of modern Britain (Professor Peter Mandler) have been brought together with historians of science (Professor Jim Secord), and classicists (Professors Mary Beard and Simon Goldhill) with experts in literary criticism (Professor Clare Pettitt), along with eight postdoctoral fellows and three graduate students, to explore the full range of the Victorian experience, representation and comprehension of the past.

Central to the group’s activities was the weekly meeting where we read and discussed Victorian material, secondary sources and our own research in progress. These were generous but heated debates, where each member had something different to bring to the table. ̽��ֱ��varied ranges of knowledge and approaches were thrashed out, sometimes painfully. These led to regular workshops with invited guests from around the world, which in turn produced editions of journals and other publications (see below for the two most recent books).

Our projects looked at major defining questions of Victorian culture that can be properly treated only by a multidisciplinary team: from what the Victorians learned in school and university, to the poetry or novels they wrote; from how the new technologies of archaeology transformed biblical scholarship, to how imperial administrators changed policies from conquering and looting to ruling and maintenance of national cultural heritage; and from explorations of contemporary political violence to explorations of the influence of the ancient world on contemporary political idealism.

̽��ֱ��project has left a mark in the field of Victorian studies. It has raised the profile of hitherto neglected bodies of knowledge which the Victorians took for granted but which we do not, largely because of our different disciplinary map. We have gained a new appreciation of the paramount significance for the Victorian imagination of classical languages and archaeology, of Egypt and the Far East, of geology and the Biblical texts.

Although the project inevitably calls itself by the buzzword ‘interdisciplinary’, we were actually studying a period when the disciplines were just beginning to be formed and professionalised. In effect, much of the work was not so much interdisciplinary, as learning to reach back behind the disciplines to different regimes and organisations of knowledge. In exploring the Victorian attitudes to the past, we were exploring how the current scholarly map was formed. In investigating a Victorian sense of heritage, we were discovering the intellectual heritage that all modern academics share.

Interdisciplinary research has to be the answer when it comes to understanding the Victorians, writes Professor Simon Goldhill, one of the researchers involved in a £1.2 million project on Victorian Britain that is reaching the end of its five-year programme.

Professor Simon Goldhill

Dr Sadiah Qureshi

From Illustrated London News, September 16, 1845

Victorian appetites

A fascination for imported Zulus and the living curiosities of the modern world, an obsession with the beauty and perfection of ancient Greece and Rome – two very different sides of Victorian appetites, and the subject of recently published books by members of the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group.

In 1853, 13 Zulus were brought and displayed as “the savages at Hyde Park Corner” (where Dickens saw them), to perform dances, rituals and songs for a public of gazing English men and women. At first, such shows tended to be small-scale entrepreneurial speculations of just a single person or a small group. By the end of the century, performers were being imported by the hundreds and housed in purpose-built “native” villages for months at a time, delighting the crowds and allowing scientists and journalists the opportunity to reflect on racial differences, foreign policy, slavery, missionary work and the empire.

In the recently published Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Dr Sadiah Qureshi provides the first substantial overview of the Victorian penchant for exhibiting live human beings, especially those from exotic foreign climes.

̽��ֱ��book is full of startling stories and stunning images, but what makes it so interesting and important is its revelation of how science and popular culture developed hand in hand where race, anthropology and geography are concerned. We are still inheriting the impact of the Victorian fascination with race, and this book reveals that history with vibrant and incisive insight.

If Dr Sadiah Qureshi explores how the Victorians looked at the exotic, disturbing and denigrated ‘others’ of Victorian thinking – the natives, the savages, the racially inferior – Professor Simon Goldhill looks at the Victorians’ projection of an ideal, glorious origin for Western culture in classical antiquity. Just as the Victorians stared with horrified distance at “the savages”, so they wondered at the perfection of Greek bodies, the order of the Roman Empire, the beauty and profundity of classical poetry.

Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity demonstrates how classics made up the furniture of the mind for Victorians, educated, as they were, in Greek and Latin and surrounded by classical imagery.

But, more significantly, this book also shows how classics became the way of enacting the most pressing cultural anxieties of the period. Whether it was Oscar Wilde and his chums looking back to Greece for sexual liberation, or painters turning to classical nudity to ground their aesthetic vision, or historians and novelists arguing the politics of democracy or the role of the early church, it was always a detour through the ideal of classical antiquity that framed their thinking.

̽��ֱ��Victorians prided themselves, anxiously, on being an age of progress, but progress was often judged and understood according to the ideal model of the ancient past – the Greece, as Nietzsche paradigmatically put it, which is the only place where we are truly at home.

These newly published books show how complex a business Victorian self-definition and self-understanding is: between public shows and grand opera, anthropology and history, religion and novels, science and painting, an image of what Western culture is, and should be, was being forged – and we are all still the heirs of this work of historical self-consciousness. Both books are the product of many years of research – and both have been fundamentally affected by their gestation within the interdisciplinary milieu of the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group.

Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2011) by Dr Sadiah Qureshi is published by ̽��ֱ�� of Chicago Press

Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity (2011) by Professor Simon Goldhill is published by Princeton ̽��ֱ�� Press

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Greek tragedy: setting the stage today

tdk25 — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Every three years since 1882, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge students have brought ancient Greek tragedies to life again through their performances in the Cambridge Greek Play, a showcase of theatrical and academic expertise that is spoken entirely in the original language.

̽��ֱ��first play – Sophocles’ Ajax – was, as the publicity of 1882 boasted, the first full performance of a Greek tragedy in ancient Greek in the modern world, and the show roused extraordinary interest. It was reviewed in all the national newspapers, and special trains had to be put on from London to bring the fashionistas up to Cambridge to see the event of the season. England was still in the grip of an intense ‘philhellenic’ love of all things Greek; classics took up 80% of the curriculum at the best schools and universities; the neo-classical paintings of Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Frederic Leighton drew crowds of thousands; Greek love was the ‘dirty secret’ of the fin-de-siècle decadents. For Victorian England, the Cambridge Greek Play represented a rare chance to see an art form that featured vividly in the cultural imagination.

Archaeological accuracy really mattered to the Victorian audience – the play had to embody the best scholarship, the most recent research. In 1882, this was ensured by the involvement of the world-famous Greek scholar Sir Richard Claverhouse Jebb, Regius Professor of Greek. This connection with research continues today, with a thriving academic interest that both feeds into and benefits from the performances. What can the surviving plays tell us of ancient Athenian society? How can we know how to pronounce a long-dead language? How can the ancient world inform our understanding of the modern world? What is at stake when Greek tragedy is staged in the theatre today, and how are its most difficult problems to be faced? It is this final question that has been of particular interest to me – how audiences might see ancient Greek theatre accurately realised on stage again, 2500 years after it was born in Athens.

Resurging interest

That first astounding show in 1882 heralded one of the most surprising developments in modern western theatre. Since the turn of the 20th century, ancient Greek plays have become part of the repertoire of all modern theatres and, since the 1970s, there has been the most remarkable explosion of performances of Greek tragedy across the world – not just in Europe and the USA, but also in Japan and Africa and Russia. In London, Paris and New York, almost no year goes by without a revival of one of these classics. In 2001 alone, there were 17 productions of Aeschylus’ great trilogy the Oresteia in the USA, which is more than there were in the whole world in the first 65 years of the 19th century. In London, three separate productions of Sophocles’ Electra were staged over a few months. When theatre director Peter Sellars wanted to stage his anguish at the Gulf War in the early 1990s, he turned to Aeschylus’ Persians – in California, Edinburgh and Austria. There is no sign of this growth slowing, on campus or in the professional theatre. Greek tragedy seems once again to speak urgently and authoritatively to a modern audience.

A voice in modern times

Why does Greek tragedy speak to us today? As with the 5th century BC, our age is an era of great confidence in the progress of science and knowledge: Greek tragedy ruthlessly exposes the pretensions in human claims to control and certainty. As with the 5th century BC, our age is obsessed with the tension between the brutal realities of war and the rhetoric of politicians: Greek tragedy anatomises this tension with painful insight. Moreover, Greek tragedy is obsessed with conflict between the genders, between public and private duty, between self-control and a sense of helplessness in the face of the world’s violence: all this too finds a powerful echo with modern audiences.

Staging Greek tragedies

It is far from clear how these great masterpieces of theatre should be translated from the page into the theatre. When the genre first flourished between 500 and 300 BC, the convention was for actors to wear specially crafted masks. All the actors were male, with a limit on how many could appear on stage at one time, and the chorus had to be composed of Athenian citizens.

How can the old conventions of the chorus work without looking like a Hollywood musical? Can masks evoke anything but bad clowns for today’s theatre? Is Greek tragedy destined to be crushed by its own formality, and end up as no more than men in black yelling portentous clichés at each other?

̽��ֱ��book How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today stems first from my research into ancient theatre and the history of theatre performance: I have been engaged for many years with exploring the political and social impact of theatre in ancient Athens, as well as with how these old plays became so important in the cultural life of Europe, especially around the turn of the

20th century. But my concerns in this book also come from a more direct set of experiences. I have been deeply moved by some great performances in the theatre; I have also been annoyed, bored, outraged by others. I wanted to explore why so many productions failed, and why the truly great productions were great.

I also had the hands-on experience of producing the Cambridge Greek Play over 12 years, with two outstanding directors – Dr Jane Montgomery, who was the Leventis Visiting Fellow in Greek Drama, and Annie Castledine, from the Complicite Theatre Company and who has also directed at the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Seeing how professional theatre is made at the ‘down-and-dirty’ level is not something most academics are privileged to do, and anyone who writes about theatre can learn a lot from such an experience. But the immediate stimulus to write my book was when I was asked to provide some suggestions for Vanessa Redgrave to read about tragedy – she was rehearsing a production of Hecuba at the time. I found to my chagrin (and to the detriment of my dignity as a Cambridge professor) that there was nothing I could really recommend to an intelligent modern actor or director to help them when daunted by the task of performing Greek tragedy. So I sat down and wrote what I hope will answer that need.

I examine the six most pressing questions any company faces with the task of staging a Greek tragedy: the theatre space, the chorus, the actor’s role, the relationship between tragedy and politics, the translation, and the representation of the gods and heroes.

I look at what we can learn from the ancient world about these issues, how the most successful modern productions have dealt with them, and how a company can negotiate a way through some of the most difficult problems these texts provide.

My hope is that actors and directors embarking on the journey of staging a Greek play might have some guidance. I hope too that, for the reader wishing to know more about these truly remarkable plays and their extraordinary re-emergence on modern stages, this might inspire them to consider what makes Greek tragedy so exciting and so relevant a genre today.

‘Simon Goldhill’s new book is enthralling. A ‘can’t put down’ and a ‘forever re-read’. His detailed analyses of so many past productions are rare and exciting. His unfolding of the Greek texts and the many different translations is both instructive and exhilarating.’

Vanessa Redgrave CBE, actress

For more information, please contact the author Professor Simon Goldhill (sdg1001@cam.ac.uk) at the Faculty of Classics. How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today is published by ̽��ֱ�� of Chicago Press.

With the curtains just closed on the 40th Cambridge Greek Play since the 1880s, Greek classicist Simon Goldhill reflects on how this creative genre still speaks to a modern audience.

His detailed analyses of so many past productions are rare and exciting. His unfolding of the Greek texts and the many different translations is both instructive and exhilarating.

Vanessa Redgrave CBE,actress

Cambridge Greek Play Committee

Olga Tribulato as Tiresias and Marta Zlatic as Oedipus in Sophocles' Oedipus the King, 2004

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‘What have the Victorians ever done for us?’

tdk25 — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��19th century has also given us almost all our most familiar institutions, our ideas about ourselves and our history, and the very fabric and rhythm of our lives.

From the rituals of royal celebrations, through Sunday afternoon museum-visiting to our unquestioning assumption that the hour of the day will be the same in all parts of the country – all these and more were the brain-children of those ever resourceful Victorians. Before the late 19th century ceremonials such as coronations and royal funerals were tawdry and often badly-organised affairs; the pomp and pageantry we now enjoy is no throw-back to some distant ‘Merrie England’ (indeed Merrie England itself was a Victorian invention), but to the modernizing court of Victoria and Albert. Likewise the idea that twelve o’clock should strike at the same hour in Glasgow or Exeter as it did in London hardly seemed pressing until the demands of railway timetabling made it so.

To take this from a Cambridge perspective, many of the subjects we now study (from philosophy to engineering) were first defined by energetic Victorian reformers. So too was the division of the Tripos into two parts, the basic university career structure, the idea that undergraduates should all follow the same terms between the same dates, the possibility that dons could marry or that women could study. There is a good chance that restricting the pleasure of ‘walking on the grass’ over college lawns to fellows only was also a Victorian innovation.

A group of Cambridge researchers has recently been awarded more than a million pounds from the Leverhulme Trust for a five-year project to investigate Victorian Britain – and particularly how the Victorians created such a radical version of the future, at the same time as they agonized over their relations with the past.

Entitled ‘Past versus Present: Abandoning the Past in an Age of Progress’, the project has taken as its logo a wonderfully evocative engraving of the 1870s by Gustav Doré, itself illustrating an earlier whimsy by Lord Macaulay. In 1840 Macaulay had imagined, far into the future, that ‘a traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St Pauls.’

It is an image that captures the nuance and sophistication of Victorian thinking about the passage of time. Not only does it conjure up a future in which the present will have become the ruined past, but it heralds too the possibility of staggering geo-political change. For here the erstwhile imperial subject from the distant colonies is treating the wreckage of London’s past imperial greatness as a suitable theme for some dilettante sketching – much as the 19th-century elite would themselves take pleasure in sketching the ruins of (say) ancient Greece or Rome.

̽��ֱ��project will be exploring different avenues across the whole range of Victorian engagements with the past, and trying to make connections between them. At its heart is an intriguing paradox. For, at the same time as 19th-century technology and economic developments were raising the prospect of a giant leap into the future, exactly the same tools and processes were opening up – through archaeology, geology, education, biology – all kinds of new pasts in incredible profusion and vexingly contradictory detail. Darwin was controversially theorizing the origin of mankind, at the same moment as archaeologists in the ‘Near East’ were digging up material traces of the biblical past and Heinrich Schliemann was claiming that he had found proof that the stories of the ancient Greek Homeric epics were actually true – attracting in the process a fan club that extended as far as Prime Minister William Gladstone.

How did people accommodate all these different pasts – and possible futures? It was a problem that engaged not only the elite of Victorian society, but – in an increasingly democratic world that was generating ‘popular history’ in large quantities for the first time – a wide spectrum across all social groups. Big questions were debated. What was the fate of empires (one vivid answer was of course provided by the Doré engraving)? What was the history (and future) of socialism? But these questions were raised in other forms too. What deserved to be in the local museum? Should old buildings be demolished to make way for ‘improvements’? What did fossil-collecting reveal about the country’s past? Should endangered animals or people be preserved?

Hasn’t all this been done before? Not in this way. Of course, there are all kinds of distinguished scholarly studies of parts of this agenda, and the project inevitably builds on those. But what the generous grant makes possible is some new, interdisciplinary ‘joined up thinking’ about the Victorian period. In a new designated research space in the midst of the main Arts’ Faculty site, the project brings together researchers from different disciplines, each with a stake in the 19th century. This means not only historians in the strict sense of the word (Peter Mandler of Caius provides the lead here) and historians of science (with Jim Secord, of Darwin fame), but also literary critics (headed by Clare Pettitt of Newnham and Kings College, London) and crucially classicists (Mary Beard and Simon Goldhill of the Classics Faculty, both of whom work on the history of classical scholarship). So far they have been joined by three post-doctoral fellows and three more are in the process of being appointed.

̽��ֱ��aim of this project is to transcend the boundaries that now tend to divide those working on the Victorian period, putting classics and theology – burning concerns to almost all of the Victorian elite – back into the centre of the picture. By thinking about what history meant to the 19th century, we may also become clearer about what it means to us.

For more information, please contact Professor Mary Beard atmb127@hermes.cam.ac.uk or any member of the group; details atwww.victorians.group.cam.ac.uk

Modern Britain was invented sometime between 1830 and 1900. It's not just a question of industrialization, compulsory education, the right to vote (at least for men) or the growth of towns, important as all those particular processes were.

̽��ֱ��project will be exploring different avenues across the whole range of Victorian engagements with the past, and trying to make connections between them.

Professor Mary Beard

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