Academic Groupthink and the Power of Randomness

What’s the best way to organise an academic research event? Actually that’s a stupid question; it all depends on what sort of an event you want, or what it’s intended to achieve. So, to narrow the focus to the sort of event I enjoy: what’s the best way to organise a research workshop on a particular theme, however broad or narrow, with the aim of having a productive and enjoyable discussion of its different aspects and with at least the possibility of generating new ideas and possibilities (new to me, at least, if not necessarily new in themselves)? I’ve spent the last few days co-ordinating the annual meeting of the Legacy of Greek Political Thought network in Bristol (and so am now thoroughly exhausted, hence liable to be a bit terse and bad-tempered), and my basic principle was to get a bunch of clever people interested in more-or-less connected if not similar things, put them in a room together and make sure that coffee and food are available at regular intervals.

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Thucydides Our Contemporary? Part VI

There is a persistent tendency among readers of Thucydides to complain about other people’s readings of Thucydides. Sometimes these are ridiculously wishy-washy and overly complex, severing the text from any connection to reality and any hope of it making a useful contribution to the world, sometimes these are absurdly simple and reductionist, denying the complexity of Thucydides’ thought and the complexity of the world in equal measure; what they have in common is that they’re all dramatically inferior to my reading. A key question for the study of Thukydidismus is the capacity of Thucydides’ text to be interpreted in such dramatically different and contradictory ways, and the malleability of Thucydides himself, able to recruited as a supporter by any number of different ideological projects. The final group of papers from the conference all engaged in different ways with this question.

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Thucydides Our Contemporary? Part V

Two brilliant papers on the second day of the conferences, by Gerry Mara (Georgetown) and Christine Lee (Bristol), engaged with the idea of Thucydides as a democratic theorist, or at any rate as a theorist of democracy. This is an unfamiliar role for him, for a number of different reasons. For the historiographical tradition, the idea of Thucydides as a ‘theorist’ of any kind, as opposed to a historian of a more or less familiar sort (whether an ideal, objective-scientific historian or a cunning mythographer), is pretty well anathema. Those who do want to see him in a tradition of political thought, meanwhile, tend to focus on reading him in terms of international relations and world order; insofar as he is seen to comment on civic society, or as his narrative of events is seen to encode political ideas, his views are interpreted as thoroughly anti-democratic, with his praise of Pericles and his portrait of Cleon and post-Periclean Athens serving equally to undermine any optimism about a democratic system. It is striking that George Grote and John Stuart Mill, who both saw Athens as a positive model for present-day society, were forced to rework or ignore Thucydides when it came to this theme, despite the fact that his account was so central to the rest of their reconstruction of ancient Greece. In brief, if Thucydides appears to offer any sort of political theory, it seems to be a pessimistic and elitist one.

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Thucydides Our Contemporary? Part IV

Can’t quite believe that it’s been a month since the Thucydides Our Contemporary? conference in Bristol – though it has been one of those sorts of months. This does create a certain problem for the enterprise of blogging on all the different papers. As time has passed, so what particular persons said in their papers has become hard for me to remember exactly; I shall therefore discuss the remaining papers in terms of the themes that happen to interest me most – which is what’s ended up in my notes -  while at the same time trying, as far as possible, to give the general purport of what was actually said. Which is really a bit unfair to all those speakers whom I haven’t got round to discussing until now, but the good news is that they’re all contributors to the forthcoming Handbook to the Reception of Thucydides – so if you just hang on until 2014 or thereabouts, you can read what they actually said…

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Honouring Mary Beard

Mary Beard has been a supporter of Classics & Ancient History in Bristol for years (she’s a Vice-President of the Institute for Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition), and so we were delighted to grab the opportunity – before everyone else starts doing it – of honouring her work as a scholar and public intellectual through the award of an honourary DLitt yesterday. You can read her own account of the experience here; the two things I’d add are that, as the Vice Chancellor himself noted, no graduand of any kind has ever tried to kiss the VC before (I think we can expect that anecdote to appear in future iterations of his traditional Graduation speech), and that I’ve never seen an honourary graduand look so positively joyful (normally they’re much too busy being solemn).

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Thucydides our Contemporary? Part III

Clifford Orwin (Toronto) opened his plenary lecture at the Thucydides our Contemporary? conference with the question of what it might mean to consider Thucydides as a contemporary, or at least as a writer with contemporary relevance.  To make him familiar is to make him irrelevant, simply a means of legitimating present approaches through a spurious appeal to classical authority. He is not a sympathiser but an antagonist, someone whose ideas are always useful because he always stands outside his and every other era (a reading that of course echoes Nietzsche’s idea of “untimely knowledge”, a means of standing outside the present in one’s imagination in order to examine and criticise it).

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Thucydides our Contemporary? Part II

It would be absurd to imply that a field as embryonic as the study of Thucydidean reception has anything resembling ‘usual suspects’, but one of the key aims of the conference was to bring together not only established scholars who’ve previously written important things on Thucydides but also up-and-coming scholars whose work has yet to become widely known (or, in some cases, to be published or even finished yet). One of the great things about having a project website that features the words ‘Thucydides’ and ‘reception’ in metaphorically large and friendly letters has been to hear from people scattered around the world who’d stumbled across it and who’d previously been working more or less in isolation, and this conference gave an opportunity to bring them over to Bristol – while some others came under their own steam. The heart of the first day was four papers from such people, all linked by the themes of history and how knowledge of Thucydides has been disseminated.

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Thucydides our Contemporary? Part I

By far the most frustrating aspect of our recent two-day conference Thucydides our Comtemporary? (I’ll come back to that question mark at some point…) was the fact that I was chairing every session. Often, of course, such duties entail desperately thinking up more-or-less intelligible questions and comments on topics one knows little about in the hope that the speaker won’t actually notice that no one has anything much to say and would far rather call it a day and head down to the pub. Not this time; I spent my whole time arbitrating on split-second finishes between three different people raising their hands at once, juggling the wish to keep the thread of debate going with the need to avoid neglecting people who had other things to say, and trying to keep vaguely to the scheduled programme. Despite the fact that every speaker stuck pretty well to time, and we’d scheduled lots of space for discussion, I had to cut things short time and again. Bringing people back at the end of refreshment breaks was even worse, as clearly these were taken as opportunities to engage in more depth, free from the interfering headmaster type threatening to withhold everyone’s dinner if they didn’t stop talking. And the problem was that actually I could happily have taken up the whole discussion time with my own questions and comments, if I hadn’t had to be all selfless and disciplined. Still, at least I have this blog to play with, and over the next few weeks (probably) I aim to give a sketch of the different papers, for everyone who couldn’t or didn’t make it to the conference, and to give me a chance to develop my own thoughts. Obviously the authors of the different papers bear no responsibility for what I’ve made of them…

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Classical Reception in New (Old?) Media

Penelope (th)Reads is a one day sewing, discussion and craft activivist outreach event, organised by Alex Wardrop (Bristol PhD student), which will take place in Easton Community Centre on Friday 13th July. The group will be starting by reading a selection of extracts from Homer, Plato and Ovid, and sewing their responses to them in an informal, friendly environment (there are only 15 places on the workshop) – but with the guidance of Rosa Martyn  from the Royal College of Needlework. No sewing skills required, no prior knowledge of the ancient texts, just enthusiasm, an open mind and some old stories!

Westside Gallery in Old Market, Bristol, will be hosting an exhibition of the work created, from 18th  – 23rd July. We’re very excited about the
possibilities, conversations, new readings and ideas that we hope will come out of this day and we have had considerable interest in participating
already from a members of the local community.

We’re hosting an opening night fundraiser at Westside Gallery on Wednesday 18th July, from 7pm in aid of Daughters of Eve, which
works with women and girls at risk of Female Genital Mutilation, and Bristol Rape Crisis.

For more information about the workshop and the exhibition, contact Alex Wardrop on alexwardrop@gmail.com.

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Thucydides our Contemporary?

June 28th – 29th 2012, University of Bristol

Thucydides has been a highly influential figure in the modern world, in academic debate and western culture.  This international conference will explore the way his work has shaped ideas on understanding the world, and his continuing role as an authority on history, politics and war.

Keynote Speakers: Clifford Orwin (Toronto); Arlene Saxonhouse (Michigan)

Public Lecture: Hunter R. Rawlings III, President of the Association of American Universities: “A Possession for All Time: why Thucydides matters so much”

Key Themes: Translation and Education; History and Historiography; International Relations; Politics and Political Theory

Speakers: Greg Crane, Jon Hesk, Edward Keene, Christine Lee, Aleka Lianeri, Gerry Mara, Jeremy Mynott, Claudia Rammelt, Liz Sawyer, Oliver Schelske, James Sullivan, Thom Workman.

Numbers on the conference are strictly limited: please contact Neville Morley (n.d.g.morley@bris.ac.uk) as soon as possible to reserve a place.  There will be a conference fee of £25 (£10 for graduate students) to cover lunch and refreshments.  The public lecture is free to attend, but we do ask that you let us know if you are intending to come.

Further information will be available at:
http://www.bris.ac.uk/classics/thucydides/events/

Supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Council and the Bristol Institute for Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition

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