Author Archives: Jessica Hughes

Introducing….Christine Plastow, Lecturer in Classical Studies

I’m really happy to be joining Classical Studies at the Open University, in my first post since finishing my PhD. I’d like to thank publicly all of my colleagues for already having made me feel so welcome! Having discovered Classics by accident when I was persuaded to sign up for a Classical Civilisation A level instead of one in History, I began my Classics career in earnest as an undergraduate at Royal Holloway, University of London in English Literature and Classical Studies. While there, I began work on the Athenian forensic speeches in a dissertation on legal language and rhetoric in [Demosthenes] 59 Against Neaira; the forensic speeches would come to be my primary research focus. I then moved to the University of Bristol, where I gained a Masters in Classics and Ancient History and continued my interest in forensic rhetoric with a dissertation on invective in the courts. Finally, I ended up at University College London to study for my PhD under the supervision of Professor Chris Carey. This project, entitled ‘Athenian Homicide Law in Context’, explored the distinctive nature of homicide in Athenian law and culture, and the ways in which the legal system set homicide apart from other crimes. My primary focus was exploring how this distinctiveness played out in rhetoric, by examining several prominent features of forensic speeches on homicide: Athenian ideology, religious pollution, relevance, and the twin issues of motivation and intent. The project illustrated that although the Athenians would regularly speak about homicide in a way that implied it was always subject to especially solemn and rigorous treatment, in practice speeches in trials for homicide or where homicide was a secondary issue were just as commonly exploited for personal and political gain as any other. A secondary goal of the project was to explore the courtroom context of delivery and the effects this may have had on rhetoric; I noted several significant differences between homicide rhetoric delivered in the homicide courts and that delivered in the popular courts. I am currently in the process of turning my thesis into a book, provisionally titled Homicide in the Attic Orators: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Context.

The next research project that I’m looking to undertake grows out of the secondary conclusions from my thesis. I’m interested in how space and place played various roles in Athenian oratory – of all genres, not just forensic. In this project, I’ll be following two major strands of enquiry. Firstly, I’ll look at how the physical space of delivery could affect the rhetoric used in a speech, by way of both visual impact and ideology. In the case of the homicide courts, the visual and ideological markers of religious solemnity – the location of all of the homicide courts at religious sites, the proximity of shrines to the Areopagus, the performance of distinctive sacrifices and the swearing of particularly weighty oaths – must have made the religious danger of homicide causing pollution particularly clear to those present at the trial, and therefore may have decreased the need for or effectiveness of pollution rhetoric. This might partly explain the apparent dearth of references to pollution in the forensic speeches for homicide. I’ll examine how this pattern extends across the courts, the assembly, and locations for public funerals, by looking at the physical features of the delivery spaces, as well as the psychological associations that they would have for those present. My second strand of enquiry looks at how spaces and places are constructed, invoked, and used rhetorically in the speeches, particularly in addressing issues of identity and ideology. The very existence of places – in my framework, locations with a particular meaning to a particular individual or group – implies identity, both for the place and for the people for whom it is meaningful. Spaces – locations defined more physically – often have effects on individuals’ behaviours and identities. Both spaces and places can invoke strong ideological associations, an effect that was no different in Athens. Thus, these themes could be deployed in rhetoric to particular effect in front of Athenian audiences. I am currently preparing a chapter on an initial case study for this project, entitled ‘Space, Place, and Identity in Antiphon 5’.

Besides my primary research interests, I’m particularly keen on 20^th and 21^st century receptions of Greek drama. While at UCL, I helped to organise a series of events called Conversations with Iphigenia, which presented discussions between the playwrights of the Gate Theatre Notting Hill’s Iphigenia Quartet, other theatre practitioners, and academics from Classics, Theatre Studies, and Translation Studies. A transcript of the roundtable discussions from these events will appear in the OU’s Practitioners’ Voices in Classical Reception Studies journal in 2018. I also work regularly with the London-based By Jove Theatre Company, where I am their research and education co-ordinator and blog editor. By Jove focus on new writing, particularly women’s writing, that presents old stories for a new audience, and has staged new versions of Greek tragedies, Shakespeare plays, and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice over the last 5 years. For more on the company, or to read the blog, see www.byjovetheatre.org. I’m also really interested in applications of feminist theory and translation studies to Classics.

When I’m not doing research, teaching is my passion. Though I enjoy teaching all aspects of Classics – particularly themes on Classical Athenian history, society, and culture, as well as Greek law – I’m an especially keen teacher of Ancient Greek. My favourite classes are students of Greek who are coming to the language as undergraduates or later, as I myself never had an opportunity to study ancient languages at school, and only started study as an undergraduate. Such courses tend to be fast-paced and high intensity, and thus require a lot of dedication and persistence – from the teacher as well as the student! Nevertheless, some of my most rewarding teaching experiences have been in Greek classes, where students have finally grasped a difficult grammatical concept after a long struggle. I think there’s a lot of enjoyment to be had in learning Greek, not only because of its extensive and poetic vocabulary and far more precise grammar than in English, but also because translating a complicated passage often feels like trying to break a code – with the same sense of achievement (and access to hidden information!) when you’re done.

I’m really looking forward to my next two years at the Open University, and I hope to meet many new faces along the way! If you’d like to find out more about me, follow me through the next couple of years, or just say hi, you can find me on Twitter @chrissieplastow or on my personal website and blog at christineplastow.com.

Classics in the Open University – The Early Days

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In this post, we share with you the text of an article that was published in the Classics journal ‘Greece and Rome’ in 1974, just five years after The Open University received its Royal Charter. It was penned by John Ferguson, the first Dean of the OU Arts Faculty; prior to this appointment, Ferguson had been teaching Classics at the University of Ibadan.

The article introduces the OU to an audience of fellow classicists who were teaching at ‘conventional’ institutions: hence Ferguson starts by explaining the OU’s mission, before moving on to discuss, with great frankness, some of the practical and academic considerations that shaped the new Faculty and the earliest Classical Studies curriculum.

We are very grateful to Cambridge University Press and the editors of ‘Greece and Rome’ for allowing us to reproduce the full text of this article on our blog – a fascinating insight into the early history of our subject area!

Pioneers of the OU: showing (from left to right) Mike Pentz, first Dean of Science; Geoffrey Holister, first Dean of Technology; Maxim Bruckheimer, first Dean of Mathematics; John Ferguson, first Dean of Arts; Walter Perry, first Vice-Chancellor; and Anastasias Christodoulou, first University Secretary.

Article title: Classics in the Open University
Author: J. Ferguson
Source: Greece & Rome, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Apr., 1974), pp. 1-10
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association

“The Open University received its charter in July 1969, offered its first courses in January 1971, and produced its first graduates (with some ‘credit exemptions’) by the end of 1972. Those who originally planned it saw that many people who for various reasons missed their opportunity of university education at the usual stage of their lives could profit from it, provided that what was offered was home-based study in spare time. They saw too that radio and television offered an excellent opportunity for helping such study to be direct and personal. Students then are admitted with no entry qualification except the age of 21. We have built a few parameters into our selection procedure; we can control the proportion admitted to any one foundation course or from any one region of the country for example; but basically it is ‘First come, first served’. Typical students are the boy who has been to a poor school, has never been turned on, has left at the age of 15 and gone into industry, and in his twenties has suddenly become excited by what he is doing and at the same time has revealed a keen mind; the girl who with decent A levels has got married at 18, sees her family growing up, is aware that she has time for some study while they are at school, and will be able to take a full-time job in three or four years; the long-term prisoner needing a constructive occupation in prison and qualification for when he comes out; the working-class lad who has entered the police force and, by ability and application, has worked his way up from the beat; the retired industrial worker or bank manager who wants a positive purpose in his retirement; the teacher who has no degree, perhaps because the family could not afford more than a two-year course, and seeks more knowledge in his subject, as well as the increment applicable to a degree; the person well settled in one profession who would like to qualify for a second career before giving up the first; the taxi-driver who is interested in people and ideas, and wants to know what it is all about. We have them all, and many others.

The Planning Committee, a body which included most of the country’s leading educationalists and no politicians, decided for three reasons that the basic courses should be of a new kind, and should be an attempt at an integrated or inter-disciplinary approach. For, first, they thought that the seamless web of learning had become too tattered, and that we were not even seeing the shreds in context. Secondly, they thought that if we were attracting the sort of students we should attract, there would be many who would have a general sense that they wanted to work in the humanities, but might not know exactly which aspect of the humanities interested them. Even more they might (for instance) think that they wanted to study history or literature, and might never dream of trying philosophy or art history unless they had had the opportunity of an earlier sample. Thirdly, operational constraints conspired to make our basic courses large in numbers. The main constraints here were the limited amount of air time available, which meant that it would not be possible to have basic courses in all the familiar university disciplines, and money, for the Open University had to establish itself on a ‘cost-effective’ basis. The pessimistic prophecies of an 80 per cent drop out have not been fulfilled; in fact in the first year we had an 80 per cent pass rate in Arts. But when we started no one knew what the results would be, and we had to be cost-effective even on the most pessimistic prognostication.

When I was appointed Dean of Arts in 1968 I was asked to name four areas in which professors should be appointed. I named history, literature, the whole area of thought (philosophy and religion), and the fine arts. It is important to see that these are not departments, and we have resisted any tendency towards a departmental organization. We did not seek at this stage to develop languages, dead or alive. There were a variety of reasons for this. First, the problems of teaching languages at a distance were quite different from any of the other problems we were facing, and we had enough problems as it was. Secondly, those who wanted courses in languages were reasonably well catered for, by the BBC, by Linguaphone, and, in the main centres of population, by evening classes. Thirdly, languages did not fit easily into the emergent pattern of basic courses, which were strongly integrated, and the amount of any one language one could have mastered as a fraction of the foundation course would not have been worth while. Fourthly, while there was general agreement that language courses should be geared in to communication, i.e. reading and writing, there was controversy whether such courses were properly part of a University degree. Languages remain one competitor for University expansion, but it is unlikely that the classical languages will have any high priority. In the meantime work on classical and foreign texts is done in translation.

Originally there were four faculties, Arts, Social Science, Science, and Mathematics. Since then we have added Technology, and Education (which does not offer a Foundation Course). Graduation is on six credits, a credit representing the successful completion of a course which runs for the whole of an academic year. Students are not permitted to take more than two credits in one year. Since the first year we have added some half-credit courses, but do not intend to have any of lower denomination. This system has the flexibility of the American system without its fragmentation, the structure of the English system without its rigidity. Students are required (unless they are accorded a ‘credit-exemption’ in acknowledgement of study already achieved at a University level) to take two Foundation Courses. They must therefore do some work in more than one faculty. But we have not bridged Sir Charles Snow’s two cultures. The majority of our original 20,000 students, and of the 48,000 we have since admitted, have tended to combine the science-based subjects or the arts-based subjects, though the figure of perhaps 200 a year who combine science and arts, small in proportion, is not absolutely negligible. The Planning Committee assumed that faculties would extend the integrated approach to the ‘second level’, and that the majority of students would graduate without going beyond second level. Specialist courses would begin at third level, and students would convert ‘general’ degrees to ‘honours’ degrees by the addition of two such specialist courses. The Arts Faculty has in fact continued integrated courses into the second level, but it is already clear that some students will take specialist courses at third level as part of their original six credits, and it is a strength of the system that they can do so. At the same time the specialist courses continue the element of integration: the literature course on The Nineteenth Century Novel looks at the historical and social background and parallel developments in the other arts, the history course on War and Society looks at the impact of war upon literature, music, the arts, and religion.

The first courses ran for 36 teaching weeks. This was reduced first to 34, and later to 32. In addition, for all science courses, for all foundation courses, and for most other courses there is a week’s intensive summer school. There is also a revision period and an examination. Students are expected to put in about twelve hours a week on a course, though some put in appreciably more. Students are assumed to be home-based. There are study-centres in the main centres of population, where they can meet with other students and with tutors (academic) and counsellors (general advisers). The basic course-material is centrally prepared and sent to them at regular intervals. It consists of beautifully printed, well-illustrated booklets. We have tried to design them so that they are strongly personal and conversational, and form a kind of dialogue between reader and writer. We invite a student to make responses, and then read on as if we were commenting on his response. Students are required to purchase some books, and these are negotiated with publishers, so that they are kept in print, and are as cheap as possible. Some of these are specially published for the course (which has a guaranteed life of four years). At foundation level there is a weekly television and weekly radio programme; at later levels these may be less frequent. They form an important bridge for some students between the familiar means of comunication and the less familiar involvement with the written word. They enable students to see what we look like and to hear our voices. They enable us to introduce eminent specialists from all over the world. They are essential to visual and auditory experience, as in drama and music. And they have a variety of other uses. Written work is corrected by part-time tutors. Students are assessed on their written work, with one three-hour exam at the end of each course to add confirmation.

The Foundation Course in Arts is entitled ‘Humanities: An Introduction’. It is frankly a compromise, one worked out through many months of patient negotiation, between a variety of sometimes conflicting opinions and interests. Sometimes it achieves an integrated approach; sometimes it is interdisciplinary; sometimes it is merely multidisciplinary. After an introduction (originally 4 weeks, now 2) each of the disciplines, history, literature, art history, music, exposes its wares. Then follows a series of case-studies (one of which, on Descartes, is effectively an introduction to philosophy), each lasting two weeks, and an extended eight-week-long case-study on ‘Industrialization and Culture’. An introduction to logic runs concurrently with the first half of the course.

Part of the introduction is an attempt to raise some questions about the relation between technology, society, and the arts. In raising these questions I take off from two famous passages in Greek tragedy, the long speech in which Prometheus outlines man’s indebtedness to him for the gift of fire, and the chorus in Antigone which sings of man’s achievements and his limitations. So that at the outset students become aware of classical literature. When we discussed the case-studies, we felt that they should enable students to apply the techniques of critical analysis which they were beginning to learn; they should where possible be inter-disciplinary; and they should open up aspects of our inheritance of which students should be aware. I was therefore insistent that one case-study should link with our classical heritage and one with our Christian heritage. For the first we chose Socrates. C. F. Angus used to describe him as one of the three most fascinating personalities who ever lived, and the only one who was not worshipped as divine (the others being Jesus and Gautama the Buddha). It was this aspect we decided to concentrate on. We did not treat Socrates primarily philosophically, partly because I do not believe that the Theory of Forms pertains to Socrates (what a lot of Vlastos’s recent collection of essays on Socrates is really about Plato!), partly because this would in any case form part of a third-level philosophy course, partly because they had not yet had their philosophical grounding. But of course there are inescapable links with philosophy. What there is also is a fascinating problem in source-criticism.

To this end I compiled a source-book on Socrates. I had often needed one for teaching in the past, and was glad to compile one. As it has met with criticism from the reviewers, a comment or two may not come amiss. It is an attempt to present all the evidence (Plato and Xenophon being represented by key-passages only) about Socrates. Many of the criticisms I accept. It had to be done in an extreme hurry, and we had, with one exception, to use out-of-copyright translations because there was no time to negotiate copyright. I missed one important passage in pseudo-Lysias (though no reviewer has in fact mentioned this), and am now persuaded that I mistranslated one Aristotle passage. But this was a source-book for students, and I do not agree that it should have had the sort of index which does students’ work for them. Of course in the later passages about Socrates there is a lot of dead wood, Stoic or Cynic moralizing, trivial anecdotes, and the like. But these late writers still had access to Aeschines of Sphettus, and perhaps other contemporary writers. No one has really asked what information they may yield, and it was not the book’s purpose to anticipate such conclusions. We were able, because of the magnitude of the O.U. operation, to put out nearly 400 double-column pages, including the first-ever translation into English of Libanius’s Defence of Socrates, for 42p.

The course-units (entitled Which was Socrates?) then are an invitation to evaluate the source-material, with a sketch of the historical background. The first radio programme is a talk with illustrative excerpts showing the problem of the principal sources. The second is a philosophical discussion between Renford Bambrough and Godfrey Vesey of the significance of the Socratic ‘universals’ for modern philosophy. The first TV programme is a presentation of the key-passages of The Clouds in conditions as near to the original as we can get in the studio. This is after all our only primary source for that period of Socrates’s life, and it is important to see it as drama, comic drama, and low comic drama. The masks incidentally, brilliantly designed, formed a problem in the heat of the studio. A second programme discusses the point of the first. Altogether we wanted students to feel the impact of Socrates the man. One of the more moving letters I have received came from a tutor in the Isle of Wight to say what a therapeutic effect the Socrates units had had on long-time prisoners in Parkhurst gaol!

After Socrates come two units entitled What is a Gospel? It is a study of the compilation, writing, nature, and tradition of The Gospel according to Mark, again with a sketch of the historical background. It seemed a good idea to expose students to two of Angus’s three seminal personalities in swift succession. It has made possible an interesting assignment, ‘Compare the reasons for executing Socrates with those for executing Jesus’. The exposition is naturally open, historical and philosophical, not dogmatic.

At the second level we apply the integrated approach to period studies. Our two main courses are Renaissance and Reformation and The Age of Revolutions. Included in the first are a couple of units on the classical and mediaeval inheritance, and in them I discuss Renaissance humanism against its classical background. The associated radio programmes are a portrait of Petrarch as a humanist, and an exposition of Platonism as an essential backcloth to Renaissance art and thought. There is one television programme, made in colour, an exploration of the neo-Platonism underlying some of Botticelli’s paintings. Obviously also the account of Florentine art and architecture includes their indebtedness to classical principles and classical originals. The Age of Revolutions naturally has less classical involvement, but Jefferson’s architecture is deeply rooted in the ancient world, as are many of the ideas of the French and American revolutions, and the High Art of the period (not least that of David) has important classical references. In addition to these we have begun to develop courses in the history of science; I suspect that I am the only Dean of Arts in the country with four chemists on his staff. One of the first two half-credits, Science and Belief from Copernicus to Darwin, includes a certain amount of material on the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic world-pictures, and on Renaissance neo-Platonism; I have contributed a radio programme on the Cambridge Platonists. A projected course on The History of Mathematics will contain a considerable body of material on Greek mathematics.

We have recently taken the decision to augment our second-level courses with two half-credits on classical civilization. The first of these, The Early Roman Empire and the Rise of Christianity, will be available in 1974. We have taken as notional dates A.D. 14-138, not without considerable heart-searching. But the reign of Augustus has two serious disadvantages for our purposes: the primary sources are too limited, scattered, and varied, and the literature is too bulky for a half- credit course; and the late Republic really does need more of Cicero’s speeches than are readily available in translation outside the too ex- pensive Loeb. The more we looked, the more the early Empire had to commend it, the emergence of the pax Romana, the rise of Christianity, Tacitus as a primary source, the climax of satire, moral philosophy represented by Seneca, the first serious invasion of Britain, plenty of material on social life, Pompeii and Herculaneum, portrait busts. So we shaped the course. We were fortunate in persuading J. P. V. D. Balsdon to join us as a consultant to write the basic history units; he quickly fell in with our unfamiliar approach to presentation without losing his own pungent style. These units are associated with television programmes on ‘The Roman Army’ by Michael Jarrett, and on ‘Image of Empire’ (a study in imperial propaganda) by myself, and radio programmes from Michael Grant and A. N. Sherwin-White. Then come two units on moral philosophy, using Seneca’s letters as a basis; the radio programmes are a dramatic presentation, entertainingly acted, of Lucian’s Philosophies for Sale, and a talk, with dramatic illustrations, on the Stoicism in Seneca’s tragedies. Next come two units on satire, Petronius and Juvenal unexpurgated. (When these are put together with our somewhat phallic version of The Clouds I shall have acquired a high reputation for immoralism!) The radio programmes are a dramatization of the Ludus de morte Claudii, and a talk on Martial, illustrated by ample quotation. Then two learned units on Roman art by Catherine King, one of our History of Art lecturers. This has associated with it television programmes on Roman domestic architecture and Roman portraits, and radio programmes on urbanism and Roman building. Then two units on social life, which Balsdon and I have shared. The television programme treats the Romans at work and the radio programmes the imperial elites, and the School of Rhetoric. Peter Salway has a single unit on Roman Britain with a television programme in which he looks at Fishbourne and Bath with Barry Cunliffe, and a radio programme on the Britons under Rome. Finally, a block of four units treats the rise of Christianity. Dr. Francis Clark together with the staff tutor, Revd. D. A. T. Thomas, is responsible for these. The first television programme shows Christianity among other religions; I have done this; the other is the first television film shot under St. Peter’s.

Set books for the course include Penguin or Mentor translations of Tacitus’s Annals, Seneca (Letters from a Stoic), Petronius and Juvenal, the New Testament and the Apostolic Fathers, as well as the appropriate volume of Lewis and Reinhold for primary sources. A very proper limit of essential expenditure to £9 for a half-course constricts our secondary sources. Salmon and Filson between them cover the history, and Wheeler the art and architecture. At the time I write it looks as if there will be an initial registration of slightly under I,000 for this course.

We hope to complement this with a half-course on Greece 450-350 B.C., though this may not be available before 1978. The present plan, which may be modified, is that the course will contain, interspersed with each other, four units on history, four on literature, four on philosophy, and four on art. The dates are notional, and may be stretched slightly in either direction. The literature is likely to concentrate on drama. We hope to take The Oresteia, and perhaps the two Electra plays, and an Aristophanes, perhaps (as Douglass Parker calls it) The Congresswomen, which fits in pleasantly with the philosophy and the political history, and is beginning to point forward to New Comedy. For the philosophy we shall probably do a double-unit on The Republic and another on The Ethics (to end the course). The art units are not yet planned, but Peter Salway will probably treat the Acropolis, and we shall surely need units on vase-painting and sculpture. Professor Gerald Fowler, who held a university post in ancient history, before entering first practical and then theoretical politics, will be a member of the course team; three regional staff with classical interests, Peter Salway, David Sewart, and Ian Howarth, have expressed a readiness to be involved, as has Mrs. Jennie Potter, the former Newnham scholar, whose husband holds an O.U. post; we hope that one of our art historians will contribute, and perhaps also one of our philosophers. The two together should form an attractive introduction to classical civilization.

Meantime, there is an important classical contribution to the gradually emerging third-level specialist courses. Indeed, I have a strong conviction that one of the most important things for classical scholars to do is to make their contribution to a fresh synthesis in this way. Thus I have written a unit on Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War for the history course War and Society; a unit on Plato’s Theory of Forms for Problems of Philosophy; and am in process of contributing study material on Alcestis, The Bacchae, Oedipus the King, and Oedipus at Colonus to The Basis of Modern European Drama, and on Greek and Roman religion to Man’s Religious Quest.

This then is the picture. It is worth remembering that something like 5,000 students a year take the Foundation Course, about 2,000 take Renaissance and Reformation, 1,200 the history of science courses, and (at present) about 700 War and Society and 400 Problems of Philosophy; as indicated, the expected figures for The Early Roman Empire are not far off 1,000. It is a not negligible contribution to interest in and understanding of classical civilization.”

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Nb. the original article contains an appendix containing the times of transmission for 1974 of the programmes referred to above. All television programmes were on BBC2 and all radio programmes on Radio 3 VHF.

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Globalizing Ovid

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Our recently-retired colleague Paula James has just returned from an exciting international conference in China. Globalizing Ovid: An International Conference in Commemoration of the Bimillennium of Ovid’s Death took place at Shanghai Normal university from May 31st to June 2nd 2017.

Paula writes “This event attracted 60 scholars from across the world and was a wonderful and historic experience superbly organised by Professor Jinyu Liu – she is at Shanghai Normal and De Pauw university and her team of students were tireless and cheerful, picking us up from the airport, translating for us, guiding us around the campus and always ready to help.

“You can see details and the programme on the Globalizing Ovid website, but just to say that this was a high point in international collaborative research as the conference was supported by Dickinson College USA, Shanghai Normal University and the National Social Science Fund of China. It is part of a US/China project to translate (with commentaries) all the works of Ovid, a Latin poet famous especially for his epic poem on myths of Greece and Rome, Metamorphoses, into Chinese.

“It marked the 2000 years since Ovid died in exile and there were all kinds of discussions on his sophisticated and mischievous takes on traditional stories, his tongue-in-cheek love poetry and his manual of seduction (Ars Amatoria) so at odds with the moral re-armament programme started by the first emperor Augustus. All this in the context of the digital age and how it helps us work across geographical boundaries on the ancient authors who continue to excite us in the 21st century.

“Ovid has played a central role in the lasting legacy of Roman culture and literature in the world today.

“I have to say that the generosity of the hosting university and the funders was overwhelming with banquets and excursions at the end of days packed full with panels and plenaries. Companions of delegates were welcomed to the events at a very modest price and I was lucky enough to have the conference fee waived and to receive a Dickinson grant of $400. It was an honour to take part in the conference – my paper went well!”

You can read the abstract of Paula’s paper on Statues, Synths and Simulacra below. All the photos on this page were taken by Paula during the conference – it looks to have been a wonderful celebration of Ovid and Ovidian scholarship!

Statues, Synths and Simulacra: Teaching Ovid through the medium of mass culture.

Abstract of a paper by Paula James

Taking two examples of Ovid’s myths of metamorphosis as refracted on screen (film and television) I shall explore the challenges classicists face in communicating ancient texts to modern audiences. Although the use of film in teaching Classical Reception can be supported and promoted (but sometimes only tolerated in UK departments) the reception researcher frequently finds her/ himself justifying their choices of 20^th and 21^st century re-workings of mythical motifs by movie directors and television series creators as intellectually valid objects of study.

This paper traces my research and teaching journey in bringing Ovid’s myths of Pygmalion (Metamorphoses Book 10) and Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (Book 4) before public audiences and scholars across the Arts and Humanities. The story of sculptor and statue has endless potential for teasing out the ethics and aesthetics of manufacturing or making over women into an ideal both in the ancient and present day contexts.

My first focus will be upon the robot girlfriend in Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Five and the ways in which related narratives in Ovid’s epic poem can provide a commentary on Pygmalion and delusions of creating or recreating an ideal. I shall argue that iconic films can prompt fresh critiques of Pygmalion and the gender and genre bending in the Salmacis story (using Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Wilder’s Sunset Blvd.)

I shall point to the pitfalls of visualising Ovid primarily in terms of cinematic experiences when his own readership would be accessing their moving images from stage and performance. Ovid’s sophisticated and mischievous use of figurative language can only be touched upon in a brief paper but his similes, metaphors and general ecphrastic strategies can be both limiting and liberating for those of us researching into Ovidian narratives on screen.

Paula James at the Globalizing Ovid conference

Introducing … Jan Haywood, Lecturer in Classical Studies

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This month we welcomed Dr Jan Haywood to the OU Classical Studies team. In this post, he tells us a bit about his academic background and research projects.

I am delighted to be joining the Classical Studies team at the Open University, having previously held teaching positions in Classics/Ancient History at the University of Liverpool and the University of Leicester. I began my academic studies reading for a BA in History, followed by an MA in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Manchester. I then read for a PhD on the topic of Herodotean intertextuality with Professor Thomas Harrison at the University of Liverpool. Intertext and Allusion in Herodotus’ Histories: Authority, Proof, Polemic identifies substantial connections between Herodotus’ work and other textual sources (oracles, prose writers, epic poetry, etc.). By highlighting his extensive engagement with a wide range of texts, my research reopens the debate on Herodotus’ source materials, since the majority of scholars accentuate his use of oral traditions. I am now putting the finishing touches to a revised version of the PhD, which will soon be published as a monograph.

My interest in antiquity is omnivorous, and I am increasingly concerned with exploring the impact of later receptions on our understanding of the ancient world. With this in mind, I am currently collaborating with Dr Naoíse Mac Sweeney (University of Leicester) on a research project that explores multiple receptions of the Trojan War/Iliadic tradition, looking synchronically across a variety of media and geographic contexts. The research examines a diverse suite of responses to the Iliad, whilst isolating particular motifs that recur in different reception contexts. For example, our research illustrates the way that various individuals across space and time have attempted to verify the historicity of the events related in the Iliad. The fifth century BC historian Herodotus, for instance, underscores the essential truth of Homer’s account in his rationalising version of the Trojan War. Similarly, Heinrich Schliemann interpreted his archaeological excavations at Troy in the 1870s as demonstrable proof of Homer’s Trojan War.

The most recent research that I have conducted for this project centres on Wolfgang Petersen’s 2004 film Troy, a film that claims to be ‘inspired’ by Homer’s Iliad. As others have already shown (including our very own Joanna Paul), the film focuses pointedly on the Homeric motif of kleos (everlasting fame)—an essential Homeric concept that denotes the illustrious glory which awaits the Trojan War’s central heroes. While many reviewers at the time criticised the filmmakers’ ostensibly ham-fisted application of this motif (see, e.g., Tim Robey’s blistering review for The Telegraph), it is worth bearing in mind that the heroes of the Iliad and the Odyssey (Achilles, Helen, Odysseus, Telemachus) are no less hell-bent on speaking of their desire to achieve kleos. Indeed, when we first meet Helen in Book Three of the Iliad, she is depicted weaving a great tapestry, on which is embroidered the conflict between Trojans and Achaeans (i.e. Greeks). Helen’s tapestry helps to reify the very heroic deeds that are the fabric of Homer’s Iliad.

In thinking about Troy’s Homeric connections, it is essential, of course, to observe the film through this prism of its own political-cultural context. In doing so, we might well be surprised to discover a decidedly nihilistic presentation of the Greeks’ central leadership. To be sure, Agamemnon and Menelaus are far from the most celebrated warriors in the Iliad (albeit note that Agamemnon is afforded his own heroic moment in battle or aristeia in Book Eleven), but neither are they imagined as morally bankrupt leaders. In contrast, Troy presents Menelaus as a lecherous, ineffectual brute, while Agamemnon is characterised as a (somewhat camp) evil sociopath, obsessed with achieving world domination. Even the other Greeks leaders (aside from the individualist Achilles) are presented as impotent, unable to constrain Agamemnon’s untrammelled desire to control the Aegean.

This contrast between the Greeks of the Iliad and Troy naturally led me to question why it should be the case that the film should offer such an insalubrious portrait of the Greek heroes. As I peered further into the background of the film, its production history, and other paratextual material (e.g. media interviews with the film’s director Wolfgang Petersen), it has become increasingly apparent that the film forges an uncomfortable parallel between the imperial actions of Agamemnon with the contemporary political manoeuvrings of George Bush. In one interview with Westdeutsche Zeitung, for instance, Petersen teases out the monochromatic worldview of Agamemnon and Bush alike, concluding that ‘projects driven by belief and fanaticism often end in disasters’—perhaps a reference not only to the fall of Troy, but also the filmic deaths of Menelaus, Agamemnon and Achilles. My research demonstrates that through the cartoonish villainy of the Greeks’ chief leader, Troy engages in a wider historical dialogue on the reasons for, and validity of the Trojan War. The film ultimately refracts the Homeric account of the war, reorientating audience sympathies away from the Achaeans towards the beleaguered Trojans, whose citadel is destroyed by an outrageous warmonger.

I hope that this brief introduction illustrates my wide-ranging interests in the classical world and its receptions. I am very much looking forward to engaging with students and colleagues alike in the months and years ahead.

by Jan Haywood

Introducing…some of our new PhD students!

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Several of our PhD students have appeared on this blog since we launched it back in February 2015. This year, we’ve already been introduced to Adam Parker and his PhD research on ancient magical objects, while Rebecca Fallas gave us the lowdown on her PhD thesis submission (a piece that subsequently got picked up by the Times Educational Supplement). Sian Beavers wrote about her project on ‘Classics, Films and Video games’, and – moving back into 2015 – we had posts from John Harrison about his work on Georgian Stourhead, and Sophie Raudnitz, who is writing a thesis on memory and forgetting in ancient Greek literature. And then there was that lovely piece about Mair Lloyd’s Living Latin project, published last week!

This Autumn we welcomed a host of new PhD students to the department, including some who are co-supervised with other departments such as Philosophy and Religious Studies. Here, three of our newest PhD students introduce themselves and their projects (hint: avid blog readers may recognise one of these students from her earlier post about the Classical Studies MA degree!)

Sarah Middle

I’m Sarah Middle, and I’m looking at how Linked Data can be integrated with existing research methodologies in the Humanities in general, and for study of the Ancient World in particular. My supervisors are Elton Barker and Phil Perkins from Classical Studies, and Mathieu D’Aquin from the Knowledge Media Institute. Linked Data resources bring together materials held in various digital collections, allowing researchers to find connections between items that might not have been apparent previously. For example, in Classics, Linked Data techniques could be used to create a virtual collection of artefacts that were found at the same site but are now held in different museums, or to link historical texts to the places mentioned within them (such as the Pelagios project). The technology has been around for quite some time, but has only started to be applied to Humanities projects relatively recently. I am really keen to see how this develops, and where Linked Data could best be used to inform the answers to existing research questions.

Before returning to study, I worked as Repository Manager at Cambridge University Library, where I was responsible for managing and curating collections of digital objects, such as articles, theses, datasets, images and videos, as well as advising researchers on how best to describe these materials in order to facilitate their discovery by other users. I had previously worked in other academic libraries, as well as Cambridge’s Admissions Office, where I managed digital media projects to encourage students to apply to the university. My previous qualifications include an MA in Electronic Communication and Publishing from UCL, and an MA in Archaeological Research and BA Ancient History and Archaeology, both from the University of Nottingham.

Paula Granados

Coming from an art historical background, Paula Granados soon recognised the importance and interdependence of both history and digital technologies. After completing her Bachelor degree in History of Art at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, she was awarded a Graduate Certificate in Teaching Spanish to Adults (First Class) by the Instituto Cervantes de Londres and Roehampton University which helped her to enhance her research skills. Paula then studied for an MA in Classical Art and Archaeology as an intercollegiate student at Kings College London and University College London, undertaking modules related to classical art and digital humanities. During this degree, Paula gained expertise in academic research related to the classical world and she also developed her knowledge about digital humanities. Her MA dissertation was entitled “HYBRID SCULPTURE, Sculptures from the Seville region, III BC – I BC: Iberian identity and Roman influence”, and looked at Ibero-Roman art and the manifestation of cultural contact in artistic artefacts.

Following along the path of her MA dissertation, Paula’s PhD research will focus on the study of cultural contacts and identity development in Early Roman Spain through Linked Open Data. Her proposal is the first step of a comprehensive study of cultural, social and political contacts and identities in Early Roman Spain by means of connection to and creation of Linked Data resources. The main problem that this research will address is understanding the dynamics of a colonial encounter where the data is fragmentary, heterogeneous and interdisciplinary. Using Linked Open Data resources and other digital technologies, this study will open up the possibility of making effective relations through large amounts of data. These relations will allow us to provide the data with some relevant context and therefore to interpret, reuse and contextualise the information in a much broader way, aiming to break through the current impasse in scholarship.

Liz Webb

After completing my MA in Classical Studies with the OU in 2014, I was eager to continue my research in more depth. I had thoroughly enjoyed working on my final year dissertation, which focused on vision and hearing in books 1 and 6 of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. I was particularly intrigued by scholarship about his use of audiences, both internal and external to the text. I also became interested in the application of sensory theory to the classical world and am therefore trying to bring these research interests together in my work.

Recent reception of Thucydides has focused on his role as a political theorist, a military strategist, a scientist and a rhetorician, which brings him firmly into the sphere of a political and intellectual elite. However, I plan to address the limitations of this approach by developing a new framework for experiencing Thucydides. I am looking to understand how Thucydides immerses his audience in episodes of his history, giving them a sense of presence which forms a point of tension with his detached authorial persona. This will open fresh perspectives on ancient war narrative which will chime with current approaches to in-depth war reporting.

I began my part-time PhD in October 2016, supported by a CHASE scholarship, and my first months have been a thoroughly enjoyable and busy time. The Open University’s induction was a wonderful starting point, giving lots of support and advice. My three supervisors, Elton Barker, Eleanor Betts and Emma Bridges, have provided fantastic support and direction in their fields of expertise. I feel very excited about taking my research forward: it really is the opportunity of a lifetime.

Arts Hub Live, and a Classical Studies Picnic

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What’s the best way of celebrating the end of the academic year at a distance-learning institution like the Open University? We can’t exactly take all our thousands of students to the pub (!), so we need to think creatively about how to collectively ‘wind down’ after the end of exams… as well as how to support students as they start to think ahead to their next modules or qualifications.

This year, the Arts Faculty tried something a bit different – a two-day academic Arts event that was broadcast live from a studio on the OU campus in Milton Keynes. The ‘Arts Student Hub Live’ (Friday June 10^th – Saturday June 11th) involved a team of producers and OU staff and students getting together to create a jam-packed programme of live chat shows, quizzes and interactive ‘study support’ sessions – all designed to help our Arts and Humanities students take stock of their achievements over the past year, and find out more about the various subjects, modules and degrees offered in the Arts & Humanities programme.

It’s difficult to express quite how much fun and hard work it was putting the event together, but you’ll be able to get some inkling from the videos on this webpage. Our main Classical Studies session involved Jess Hughes and Henry Stead rustling up a lunchtime ‘Classical picnic’, which they shared with the Hub presenter Karen Foley and her pet rhinoceros. Radishes, retsina, dates and Ambrosia rice pudding were just some of the delicacies that we used to showcase the diversity of Classical Studies and introduce our tempting undergraduate curriculum.

Other sessions with a classical theme included Henry’s talk about Creative Writing, and Jessica’s discussion with Dan Weinbren about ‘Myths of the early OU’ (think Pygmalion and Educating Rita). We’ve embedded those three videos here, but you can find all the sessions from the event on the Student Hub Live website. And if our picnic video inspires you to learn more about our Classical Studies modules, you might like to try some tasty taster materials on our department website.

(Follow this link to access the whole Arts Hub Live programme)

Classical Studies picnic

Myth and Storytelling

Creative Writing

ps. The Student Hub Live is on Twitter. Follow @StudentHubLive for notifications of future events.

A postcard from Rome (the RAC/TRAC conference 2016)

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The Open University was well represented at the combined Roman Archaeology Conference and Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference (RAC/TRAC for short), held at La Sapienza University in Rome from March 16^th-20^th. A crowd of us went along to present papers, run sessions and/or listen to the latest research in Roman Archaeology – and of course we also took the opportunity to visit museums and sites across the Eternal City…

Papers

Stuart McKie giving his paper on curse tablets

Jessica Hughes and Stuart McKie both presented in a session on Thursday entitled Appropriating Traditions, Negotiating Forms: Material Culture and Roman Religion Between Categories and Variables. The session was organised by Katharina Rieger from the University of Erfurt, who had asked us to consider “how [we] might make use of standardisation, appropriation and transformation when dealing with the varieties from the world of things.”

Jessica considered these issues in relation to the votive offerings she works on, revisiting the ancient and modern terminology for dedications; she also explored how digital technologies such as data-tagging and cluster analysis might lead us towards new ways of dividing and classifying the millions of votive objects that survive from the ancient world.

Stuart then looked at how the categories developed by scholars in relation to Greco-Roman curse tablets might be applied or re-invented in relation to the North-Western curse tablets that he is studying in his PhD. His paper emphasised the role of social context and on-going personal relationships in the creation of the tablets, and drew parallels with anthropological case studies from traditional cultures in the modern world. (Visit Stuart’s blog to find out more about this topic!)

A distance shot of Eleanor Betts, talking about Ostia and the Senses

Eleanor Betts had organised a whole panel on Sensory Archaeology, and this took place on the Friday morning. Taking as its theme the multiple perspectives of sensory space, this session explored the role played by the senses in recognising, understanding and using Roman urban space, with a specific focus on movement within the cities of Rome, Ostia and Pompeii. Eleanor’s own paper (‘Multisensory Mapping of Ostia’s Regio I.IV’) demonstrated the extent to which reconstructing sensory data might alter our perceptions of ancient cityscapes. (You can read more about Eleanor’s work on the senses on the Sensory Studies in Antiquity blog).

Field trips

When the conference drew to a close on Saturday afternoon, many of the delegates made their way down to the Roman Forum. A number of us spent the afternoon exploring the church of Santa Maria Antiqua, which had re-opened with great ceremony earlier that week when the icon of the Madonna had been brought ‘home’ in a procession from the church of Santa Maria Nova. We were quite amazed by the museological techniques that the curators had used to bring the wall-paintings alive, such as the lasers projecting colours, details and explanatory text on top of the faded frescoes.

Individually, we managed to fit in several other research-related visits to Roman museums. On Wednesday Jess met the painter Umberto Passeretti at Trajan’s Markets to interview him about his exhibition ‘Un presente antichissimo’ for our OU e-journal Practitioners’ Voices in Classical Reception Studies. It was fantastic to walk around the temporary exhibition – arranged amidst the ancient sculptures – and to listen to the artist talk about his classically-inspired paintings of myths and bodies.

Jess and Emma-Jayne also went the Capitoline Museums to visit the exhibition Capitol. Myth, Memory and Archaeology, although we spent an equal amount of time gazing at the tiny gemstones from the collections of the Fondazione di Dino e Ernesta Santerelli.

Offerings left at the remains of the Temple of Julius Caesar in the Forum Romanum to mark the Ides of March.

Before the conference started on Tuesday, Stuart witnessed a fatal stabbing at Largo Argentina… well, the re-enactment of one anyway! It was the Ides of March, and a local historical re-enactment group put on a dramatization of the assassination of Julius Caesar – it was quite an experience! Also while in the city, Stuart had a look at the new display of the curse tablets from the Fountain of Anna Perenna in the Epigraphic Museum at the Baths of Diocletian. It’s a great display, and shows not only the curses themselves but the magic dolls and other ritual objects deposited in the fountain.

And finally…

Since at least one other OU Classicist is going to Rome this year, we thought it was only fair to share our best food-related discoveries too!

For lunches around the forum/Piazza Navona area we would recommend the Antica Birreria Peroni. It has a nice atmosphere (lovely frescoed walls), and a reasonably-priced menu; dishes include Roman classics like spaghetti cascio e pepe and is open throughout the afternoon (useful if, like us, you lose track of time in the museum!)

If you are after artichokes (carciofi) or just something a bit more traditional, try Trattoria da Giggetto located right next to the ancient Portico d’Ottavia.

La Sapienza University is in the area of San Lorenzo, which is a little way from the city centre. But if you find yourself there, we’d highly recommend a visit to Pinsa e Buoi.

Everyone has their favourite place for ice-cream in Rome so why not try them all?! Emma-Jayne’s favourite is San Crispino, just round the corner from the Trevi Fountain on Via della Panetteria (they also have a shop close to the Pantheon) and highly recommends their ginger and cinnamon or straciatella flavours. There’s also a San Crispino’s at Fiumicino airport!

Emma-Jayne (and Constantine) in the Capitoline Museums

Iambus and Elegy: New Approaches (A Q&A with Laura Swift)

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This week we chatted with OU Classicist Laura Swift about her newest publication – a volume co-edited with Chris Carey (UCL) entitled Iambus and Elegy: New Approaches (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Please can you define iambus and elegy for us?

LS: Iambus and elegy are two important types of early Greek poetry, and along with melic poetry, they’re often grouped under the category of ‘early Greek lyric’. They flourished in the seventh and sixth centuries BC (though they were almost certainly performed long before that), and in chronological terms our surviving examples come in the period between Homer and Athenian tragedy that often gets skipped over in undergraduate courses. The famous authors include Archilochus and Solon (who wrote both iambus and elegy), Tyrtaeus, Theognis and Simonides (who wrote elegy), and Semonides and Hipponax (who wrote iambus). Neither form is particularly easy to define, which was one reason that we wanted to compile an edited volume on them. Normally ancient scholars divided up poetic forms according to metre, but iambus and elegy both use metres that cross genres. Elegy is more straightforward in a way, as it can be defined as poetry that uses the elegiac couplet, but it’s very hard to pin down in terms of any core content or style, since we have narrative or mythological elegy, drinking songs, love poetry, and political philosophy. The one thing it doesn’t seem to contain is anything ‘elegiac’ (in the sense of the English word ‘elegy’, meaning a lament), and that’s often muddied the waters in trying to define it. Iambus is rather a hotch-potch of different metres, so people have often tried to define it in terms of content instead, and it’s usually thought of as abuse poetry. It’s true that there’s plenty of abuse, vitriol, and dirty language in iambus, but it’s not only blame-poetry: it can also be humorous, or even moralising and philosophical. So both are very wide-ranging and diverse forms, and are hard to pin down.

How have these subjects traditionally been studied?

A lot of scholarship has focused on definitional questions, and so one aim of the book was to move beyond this and study the poetry itself for what it is. Iambus and elegy have also been considered the poor cousin of melic poetry, and so they’ve had less attention than (say) the poetry of Pindar or Sappho. But they’re also a dynamic area, not least because new poems continue to turn up regularly. Over the course of the twentieth century, the amount of iambus and elegy that is available to scholars increased dramatically, and that has carried on in recent years. For example, a major new elegy by Archilochus was published in 2005, and some more fragmentary lines of his iambics were found in 2012. Because we’re dealing with quite a small corpus, new finds can really change what we think about a poet or a genre, and that makes it an exciting field to study.

How did you get the idea for the book?

The book was based on a conference that my co-editor Chris Carey and I organised in 2012, as part of a Leverhulme Fellowship that I had at that time. I had originally thought of having a conference just on Archilochus, the author I was working on, but then decided to broaden it out to iambus and elegy (the two forms Archilochus composed in), because I thought that would allow more variety and help us make connections between different poets. Lyric poetry is a vibrant sub-field in Classical Studies, with a very lively community, but most of the conferences in lyric are dominated by papers on the melic poets. Chris pointed out that there hadn’t ever been a conference focusing exclusively on iambus and elegy, and it was a great opportunity to put them centre-stage. We were really happy with how the conference went, and OUP was interested in publishing a volume inspired by it, and so we worked alongside some of the scholars who gave papers at the conference to put a collection together.

How long did it take to put the book together?

The conference took place in July 2012, and we started talking to contributors about a volume and putting together a draft proposal for OUP that autumn. The whole process of getting together the contributions, getting feedback to the contributors on their chapters, and then working with them to get revised versions took just over two years, and we submitted the completed manuscript to the Press in December 2014. After that, the copy-editing and typesetting process took about another year, and so the book appeared in print this February.

What was the hardest part of the process, for you as an editor?

There were two aspects that I found challenging. The first was keeping on top of all the contributions at the stage where we were dealing with revisions: for example, keeping track of which stage each paper was at, when we had last been in touch with each contributor, and whether there were outstanding queries we needed to resolve or we were waiting for them to respond to something we had raised. In any edited volume, some contributors are in a position to turn around their piece very quickly and others need more time to fit it in with their other commitments, and so there’s a certain amount of diplomacy needed in encouraging those who still needed to get papers in, while making sure that the people who had already done so didn’t feel we’d forgotten all about them or that the project had lost momentum.

The second thing was that I hadn’t realised how much work would be required from the editors after the final submission of the manuscript, during the copy-editing and typesetting process. Although I’ve been through that process with monographs, it’s much easier when you’re dealing with something that’s just your own work. Dealing with copy-editing queries on someone else’s article and checking consistency across chapters is much more challenging. Fortunately, Chris had done all of that before, and so it was fantastic to have an experienced co-editor.

Can you tell us about your own chapter on Archilochus’ erotic imagery?

My chapter is about how Archilochus uses imagery associated with the natural world in his erotic poems, particularly images of plants and fertility. This is a very common strand of imagery in Greek poetry, where a woman’s body is compared to the landscape (so a young girl is like a beautiful wild meadow, and a married woman is like fertile ploughland). But I argue that Archilochus plays with this imagery and turns it around. For example, rather than praising a young woman by comparing her to a beautiful landscape, he abuses a woman for being ‘past it’ by comparing her to a dried up wintry landscape, or to a fruit that’s starting to get flaccid and over-ripe. So Archilochus is reworking imagery from other poetic genres in a provocative and playful way, which showcases his creativity as a poet.

Iambus and Elegy: New Approaches is published by Oxford University Press.

My MA experience, by Sam Spencer

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In December 2015 our first holder of the Baron Thyssen MA Scholarship in Classical Studies completed her studies, achieving a Merit in our MA in Classical Studies. To celebrate this achievement we asked Sam to share her experiences of being an MA student at the OU. Here’s what she wrote …

I started with the OU in 2006, a level 1 Spanish module for pleasure, which quickly developed into a BA (Hons) Humanities with Classical Studies. I had always regretted not taking Latin and Roman history further than ‘O’ level at school, so this was the fulfilment of a personal ambition. Three months after finishing my degree, I realised that I missed the studying (the OU is addictive!), and looked into an MA in Classics. There was a taught MA at the University in my home city, but I felt that the OU continued to meet my personal needs better: I am a single mum, who works school hours, and I needed the flexibility that studying with the OU gave me. The fact that it was mainly assignment-based was an important part of my choice, as I don’t do as well in exams. And I knew that I would have the same tutor from my Classics degree modules for the first two years of the MA (who then became my dissertation supervisor), and that continuity was a bonus.

The first year was busy, four different blocks, giving a good grounding for what was to come, and although the TMAs were challenging, I could see my progress through the year as I became more analytical, critical, and more concise in my writing, and was beginning to get an idea for what I really enjoyed and would like to do for my dissertation. I even passed the exam at the end of the year, which gave me confidence for the second year, which I was not looking forward to: Greek Theatre. I didn’t think I would enjoy this, but threw myself into it in my normal way, and discovered that it really wasn’t too bad. I think that having done the Myth module as part of my degree helped with the background, and a few of us from across the country met in Cambridge just before the module started to watch the Greek plays that year, which brought them alive, and showed us that Aristophanes was still relevant (and very funny) today.

And finally, my favourite part: the dissertation. I am quite motivated and focussed in my studies, and really enjoyed all of the reading and researching. I knew that historiography was the area that interested me the most, and wanted to investigate Marcus Agrippa and his contribution to Augustus’ rise to power. Having discussed this with my tutor, this was expanded to ‘How important were Augustus’ networks and alliances in gaining and maintaining power?’. It was a really vibrant time in Rome’s history: there is still a lot of extant literature and even more modern scholarship. My research led me through some well-known names: Julius Caesar, Marcus Antonius, Cicero, but also the development of the army, and of patronage, the changing political situation, and relationships with client kings. But most of all, to find evidence of the many skilled men who worked in the background and supported Augustus.

How did I develop? Key to it all were my time management skills, and being flexible in my studies (as my children moved from primary to secondary school, it became increasingly difficult to put them to bed at 8 pm so that I could study, so l adapted to shorter sessions at night and early morning, and whenever the opportunity arose!). I developed the ability to speed read and quickly pick out what I needed from a text. Now I am definitely more critical when reading modern scholarship and finally better at argument and balance, thanks to my supervisor who constantly challenged me. I also benefitted from SCONUL access to Manchester University Library, and the OU’s own online resources and the JSTOR database. I have a small library of my own now too.

I hope that I have shown my children that it is never too late to achieve something you really want, and that you can do well if you work hard at it. Achieving the MA was good, but more than that, I met some wonderful people along the way who kept me going (we were lucky enough to have face-to-face tutorials then, but still used forums to keep in touch). I now enjoy Greek theatre, which seems to be enjoying a revival, and I discovered a love of Homer. I’m not sure of my next steps – after a few months off, I am definitely missing the studying, and want to brush up my Latin, while I keep my eyes open for opportunities where I can use my administrative skills combined with something in the Classical world. I would really recommend the OU MA: as University teaching becomes more digital and online, they have a wealth of experience in providing distance-learning modules, and excellent tutors to support you.

by Sam Spencer

‘How to submit a PhD thesis’, by Rebecca Fallas

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Rebecca Fallas is a full-time PhD student who has just submitted her thesis on ‘Individual Responsibility and The Culture of Blame Surrounding Infertility in Ancient Medical Texts’. We asked her if she had any advice for other PhD students approaching submission – here’s what she wrote!

‘You know the transitional phase of childbirth, where a woman says she can’t go on and the midwife will say that means you’re nearly there? Well I’m hoping that is the same with this thesis.’

About a month before submitting my thesis I found myself uttering this sentence (working on ancient infertility inevitably means that any analogies I make are related to childbirth in some way). This was at the stage where the tiredness had really set in but it was also the point where the end was in sight and I finally began to believe that my thesis could be completed before the deadline for submission.

As anyone will tell you, the final few months before submitting a PhD thesis are a whirlwind. There are drafts and redrafts being pinged back and forth between you and your supervisors. That section of a chapter that you’ve been (often with good reason) putting off for the last three years can wait no longer. There are corrections to be made, references to chase, a bibliography to check and arguments to refine and all you really want to do at this point is lie down in a dark room and pretend the world doesn’t exist (this may have been just me but I suspect it’s fairly common).

Although slightly manic, as the thesis came together I actually found I enjoyed the final stages of thesis writing. Admittedly this may have been an academic version of Stockholm syndrome (where kidnap victims start to identify with their captors) but I learned a lot in those last few months before submission. Having had some time to reflect I thought I would share some of the tactics I employed to get my thesis written, things which helped me to keep my sanity – and one thing which meant that I nearly missed my deadline.

1) Get organised.

In the final few months before submission your world shrinks somewhat and your thesis is likely to become, if not the only thing in your life, one of the few things that can grab your attention. Although this is true to some extent throughout your PhD it does step up a gear at this point. Knowing that this would be the case a couple of months before submitting I decided to get organised.

In terms of thesis this meant going through all the criteria for submission from how to set out the title page to downloading the form that I needed to complete when I submitted. I also made sure I had all the paper and ink cartridges I would need for printing. I also sorted out all the non-thesis things that needed to be done before submission. I wrote birthday cards, booked appointments and did anything I could that would mean I needed to keep as little as possible in my head and fewer things to distract me.

2) ‘Thesis brain’

Unfortunately being so focused on one thing means that inevitably other things fall out of your brain. This might be a case of not being able to remember simple facts or completely forgetting people’s names. In my case it was forgetting that the university library doesn’t open on a bank holiday (let’s be honest, forgetting that it actually was a bank holiday). If your brain deems it non-essential it may well refuse to recall it.

I termed this phenomena ‘thesis brain’ and if it does happen to you rest assured you probably aren’t losing your memory and it is (mostly) reversible once you’ve submitted. The other positive of ‘thesis brain’ is that it gives you some interesting stories to tell post-submission (one of mine includes two suspected cases of Ebola – don’t ask).

3) Plan some time out.

With a deadline looming it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking ‘I don’t have time to stop’ but you do and it’s essential that you do. This doesn’t have to be a big night out and to be honest you will probably be too tired at this point anyhow. Take an hour out to have coffee with a friend or dinner with family or anything that involves communicating with another human being. Admittedly, had I read this advice six months ago I would have thought two things: a) what an obvious thing to say and b) it’s ok for you to say that but I really don’t have time. However, in the middle of submitting a thesis it’s easy to forget and although it’s taken me a long time to learn this, taking that time out will make you more productive in the long run, I promise.

4) Beware of the inevitable guilt trip.

On the subject of taking time out, this seems the perfect time to mention guilt. For me, and probably a lot of people, writing and guilt go together. From asking myself why hadn’t I read/written this before now, to ‘what on earth was I thinking taking a week off last Christmas?’: I could beat myself up about anything. About two months before submitting I realised that I was spending too much time and energy (of which I had little to spare) on asking myself why I hadn’t done something already rather than getting tasks completed now.

In the end I told myself there was time to beat myself up after submitting (although to be fair after the thesis was finished it didn’t matter anymore) and right now it was about getting on with it – this telling-off was the best thing I ever did and freed me to get on with finishing the thesis.

5) There is no right way to complete a thesis.

Of course, there are guidelines to follow and standards to be met but how you go about getting there is unique to you. Just because Bob wrote his introduction in his first year and looks at you in horror when you say you haven’t written yours 5 months before submission does not mean you are doing the PhD wrong, just that you’re approaching it in a different way, and that’s fine (really it is). Also if, like Bob, you did write a perfect introduction by the end of your first year that’s also fine but do try and keep the looks of horror to a bare minimum – they are not helpful.

6) Do not – I repeat do not – finish proofing, print, bind and post off your thesis on the submission date.

This is what I did and it was nearly my undoing (and yes I should know better). I was very lucky that this did not go terribly wrong. It will take you longer than you think to print out your thesis. In my case, this was a three-and-a-half hour printing marathon which involved much shouting at my printer (which I still cannot look at without an involuntary shudder) and cleaning the entire house because I could not stare any longer at the printer willing it to print quicker.

This resulted in me turning up at the binders 15 minutes before it shut. They (very kindly) ended up staying open 30 minutes later than normal during which time they had to deal with a slightly hyper and very tired PhD student (I still owe them a box of chocolates). Then there was the sprint to the post office before it shut at 6pm.

Do not do this. However, if this does happen to you remember you are not alone.

7) Recognising that the end is in sight.

One of the scariest things about a PhD is that it is your project and only you can write it. This is not merely scary: it can be overwhelming at times. However, in those final few months I realised that while the impending deadline was still scary, my thesis no longer was. Despite all its faults, all the things I might have done differently and all the things I still don’t know (I have a long list of all three) I had written a thesis. Four months before I submitted, I genuinely didn’t believe this was something I would achieve. However, very slowly in those last few months I began to feel that, although I still had no idea how it was going to happen, finishing my thesis was something I could do.

Those final few months are tough, there is no way around that, but for me they were also the most rewarding part of the entire PhD. In the final stages of thesis writing everything happens fast; all of a sudden, chapters go from being drafts to being finished, you find a place for the pesky bit of evidence that needed to be included but didn’t seem to fit anywhere and that perfect quote to open Chapter 5 suddenly appears from nowhere. There is nothing like seeing a project you’ve been working on for so long come together in this way. However, in the midst of submitting a thesis it’s easy not to recognise this and to ignore all the little accomplishments because all you can think about is what is left to do.

And perhaps this is the most important message I would pass on to anyone heading towards completing their thesis. No matter how stressful it is or how tired you are, take enjoyment out of seeing your thesis come together and from the knowledge that the end is in sight.

by Rebecca Fallas