![Dr Pantelis Michelakis](https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/ws/files/289441391/Winter120.jpg)
Dr Pantelis Michelakis
M.A.(Lond.), Ph.D.(Cantab.)
Current positions
Reader in Classics
Department of Classics & Ancient History
Contact
Press and media
Many of our academics speak to the media as experts in their field of research. If you are a journalist, please contact the University’s Media and PR Team:
Research interests
Research Interests
My research interests are in ancient Greek culture, literature and theatre, and in their reception in antiquity and in the modern world.
I have published on Greek tragedy, performance history, classical reception, film, and media theory/history. Among my publications are three monographs: Greek Tragedy on Screen (Oxford University Press, 2013), Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis (Duckworth, 2006), and Achilles in Greek Tragedy (Cambridge University Press, 2002; reissued 2007). I have also edited or coedited four volumes of essays: Classics and Media Theory (Oxford University Press, 2020) The Ancient World in Silent Cinema (Cambridge University Press, 2013; with Maria Wyke), Agamemnon in Performance, 458 BC to AD 2004 (Oxford University Press, 2005; with Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh and Oliver Taplin), and Homer, Tragedy and Beyond: essays in honour of P.E. Easterling (SPHS, 2001; with Felix Budelmann).
I am at present writing two monographs. One of them is on archaic and classical Greek representations of the plague, focusing on how different types of narrative (esp. epic, tragedy and historiography) use the plague to thematize the conditions of their production and transmission (for OUP; for a taster see here). The other monograph is on the encounter between ancient Greece and early cinema at the turn of the twentieth century and on the wider implications of that encounter for classical antiquity and the culture of modernity (a chapter can be found here). I am also currently working on articles on classics and media theory/history, on classics and cinema in the digital age, on the performance history of Greco-Roman drama and on Greek aesthetics and literary theory.
Among research-related events, I have organized an international conference on media history/theory and the classics, held at the University of Bristol on 25 and 26 November 2016, followed by a series of research workshops in Bristol and Bonn. I am also co-director, with Prof. Maria Wyke (UCL), of a project on representations of ancient civilizations in silent cinema. We have held numerous project events, including a whole series of archival film screenings with live musical accompaniment in Europe and North America (Anaheim, Athens, Berlin, Bologna, Bristol, London, Malibu, and Oxford).
I have been Editor-in-Chief of the Classical Receptions Journal (2020-23) and member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of the Classical Tradition, the Journal of Greek Media & Culture, and the Bloomsbury series Classical Receptions in Twentieth-Century Writing. I am also Consultant Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at the University of Oxford, Honorary President of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, and, until recently, member of the Peer Review College of the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I have held grants by the British Academy, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the A. G. Leventis Foundation as well as Research/Visiting Fellowships at the Free University in Berlin (2010-11), the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies at Princeton University (2015-2016) and the University of Bonn (2017, 2020).
I have been member of the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Bristol since 2002, a former Head of Department, Director of Research, and Director of the Bristol Classics Hub which aims to widen access to the study of Greece and Rome in schools across the South West and beyond by supporting the sharing of teaching expertise and the development of new approaches to Classics teaching. Before joining Bristol, I was Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Wolfson College Oxford and Research Fellow at the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at the University of Oxford (1999-2002).
Contact
Room 2.37, 11 Woodland Road
(0117) 928 9785, P.Michelakis[at]bris.ac.uk
Research Supervision
I would be interested in taking on postgraduate students with research interests in any aspect of archaic and classical Greek literature; Greek tragedy and comedy; Greece, Rome and cultural transmission; classics and film; classics and modern theatre; classics and old/new media. Current/recent research topics supervised: Crete in archaic Greek literature and thought; the concept of the future in Greek tragedy; hatred in early Greek literature; queer theory and gender ambiguity in Greece and Rome; performativity and classical antiquity in performance in the Edwardian era; African adaptations of Greek tragedy; Greece and Rome in science fiction.
Teaching
My teaching interests are in archaic and classical Greek literature and culture, Greek and Roman drama, cultural transmission, classical poetics, and the reception of Greece and Rome on stage and screen. I have recently taught the following modules:
Greek and Roman Drama (core unit)
Communication and the Classics (final-year seminar)
Greek Poetry and Poetics (final-year seminar)
Cinematic Antiquity (final-year seminar)
Plato's Symposium (intermediate Greek)
Comedy and Philosophy on Tragedy (advanced Greek)
Plague narratives in Greek literatury (advanced Greek)
Archaic Greek Lyric (advanced Greek)
Projects and supervisions
Research projects
Classics and Media History/Theory
Principal Investigator
Description
This project seeks to strengthen and broaden the international and interdisciplinary collaboration of three groups of researchers from the Universities of Bristol, Bonn and Cornell working at the intersection…Managing organisational unit
Department of Classics & Ancient HistoryDates
19/03/2018 to 19/03/2019
Ancient narrative: representation, anticipation, and teleology
Principal Investigator
Role
Researcher
Description
Bristol and Heidelberg have strong mutually complementing research and teaching interests in ancient narrative and narratology. Heidelberg is currently the centre of a major ERC project on ‘Experience and Teleology…Managing organisational unit
Department of Classics & Ancient HistoryDates
04/04/2016 to 29/07/2016
Thesis supervisions
Hatred in Hesiod
Supervisors
Conceptions of the Future in Aeschylus' Oresteia
Supervisors
To explore strange new worlds
Supervisors
Fluid Bodies
Supervisors
Publications
Selected publications
01/01/2013Greek Tragedy on Screen
Greek Tragedy on Screen
The Ancient World in Silent Cinema
The Ancient World in Silent Cinema
Recent publications
13/12/2023The Antelope and the Lioness
Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies
Narrative Contagion and the Poetics of Coercion in Archaic and Classical Greece
Narrative Contagion and the Poetics of Coercion in Archaic and Classical Greece
Thinking with and through Literature in Friedrich Kittler’s Discourse Networks, 1800/1900
Friedrich Kittler
Security and the Plague in Homer, Sophocles and Thucydides
Omnibus
Topologies of the Plague in Homer, Sophocles and Thucydides
Skene