You are warmly welcomed to a series of free, online seminars, taking place this autumn (2023), on the topic of orality and early Greek epic. These webinars will be hosted by Frances Pickworth and Pantelis Michelakis at the University of Bristol.

This series of webinars will explore and stimulate discussion about the latest developments in scholarly thinking on the implications of orality for our understanding of early Greek epic. It aims to help the important and interesting conversations about orality that are happening in certain academic communities to circulate more broadly within and beyond the field of Classics. With that in mind, the series is aimed at a broad audience of both academics and students: that includes both those who are already working closely with Homer, Hesiod, and other archaic epic, and those whose research is in less direct engagement with these works. We hope these seminars will demonstrate the benefits of a serious consideration of the implications of orality for how we understand and analyse early Greek epic, by highlighting both the additional insights it may bring, and the potential for orality to complicate and challenge the methods and assumptions of literary criticism.

These webinars will take place on Zoom during this autumn term, to be held every week between mid-October and mid-December 2023, at 17:00-18:00 BST/GMT on Wednesdays. The format is 30-min paper + 30-min discussion.

To attend all or any of these seminars, please register via Zoom. Registration is free. If you have any questions about the series or problems signing up, please email Frances Pickworth at f.pickworth@bristol.ac.uk.

PROGRAMME

18th October - Prof. Egbert Bakker (Yale), ‘An Interformulaic Cyclops: Observations from the Cave’. View abstract - PLEASE NOTE that this webinar will begin at 18:30 BST (= 13:30 EDT).

25th October - Prof. Christos Tsagalis (Thessaloniki), ‘Oral Intertextual Neoanalysis and Early Greek Epic’. View abstract

1st November - Prof. Elizabeth Minchin (ANU), ‘From Parry and Lord to the Present: Observing the Development of Oral Theory’. View abstract - PLEASE NOTE that this webinar will begin at 12:00 GMT (= 23:00 AEDT).

8th November - Prof. Margalit Finkelberg (Tel Aviv), ‘Economy and Extension Revisited’. View abstract

15th November - Prof. Jonathan Ready (Michigan), ‘How I Think We Should Think about Orality and the Homeric Epics’. View abstract

22nd November - Prof. Adrian Kelly (Oxford), ‘How Orality Complicates Our Notion of “Sources”’. View abstract

29th November - Prof. Jonathan Burgess (Toronto), ‘"Death (Apart) from the Sea": Teiresias' Prophecy and the Telegony’. View abstract

6th December - Prof. Ahuvia Kahane (Trinity, Dublin), ‘Entangled Modalities: “Orality”, Language, Ethics, and Ontology’. View abstract

13th December - Prof. Justin Arft (Tennessee), ‘Traditional Referentiality and the Bounds of Epic’. View abstract - PLEASE NOTE that this webinar will begin at 18:00 GMT (= 13:00 EST)