Arlene Allan
is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Classics, University of Otago, New Zealand. Her research and teaching interests include ancient Greek socio-religious history, Athenian drama and the interface between Graeco-Roman religion and early Christianity. She is co-author with Ian C. Storey of A Guide to Ancient Greek Drama (Blackwell 2005, rev’d 2nd ed. 2014), co-editor with Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides and Emma Stafford, and contributor to, Herakles Inside and Outside the Church: From the First Apologists to the End of the Quattrocento (Metaforms vol. 18, Brill 2020), and sole author of Hermes (Routledge 2018) and of several articles and book chapters in these subject areas.
Eran Almagor
is author of many studies on Plutarch and other Greek writers of the Roman imperial period (Strabo, Josephus). His interests include the history of the Achaemenid Empire and its image in Greek literature (especially in Herodotus and Ctesias), Plutarch’s works (mainly the Lives), and the modern reception of antiquity, particularly in popular culture. He is the author of Plutarch and the Persica (Edinburgh University Press 2018), and is co-editor of Ancient Ethnography: New Approaches (with Joseph Skinner, Bloomsbury 2013) and The Reception of Ancient Virtues and Vices in Modern Popular Culture (with Lisa Maurice, Brill 2017).
Jean Alvares
is Professor of Classics and Humanities at Montclair State University. He has presented papers on a wide range of subjects in the Humanities. Many of his publications are centered on the Greek and Roman novel, including numerous articles. He edited, with S.N. Byrne and E.P. Cueva, Authors, Authority and Interpreters in the Ancient Novel: Essays in Honor of Gareth L. Schmeling (Barkhuis 2006), and is finishing a monograph on ideal themes in the Greek and Roman novel for Routledge. He has worked on and published essays on classical myth in recent movies. With his colleague Patricia Salzman-Mitchell he co-authored the book Classical Myth and Film in the New Millennium (Oxford University Press 2018). He also has interests in Asian studies, with a focus on China.
Alix Beaumont†
died of cancer while this book was in production. He was a PhD student in the Department of Theatre, Film, Television and Interactive Media at the University
Monica S. Cyrino
is Professor of Classics at the University of New Mexico. Her research centres on the reception of the ancient world on screen, and the erotic in ancient Greek poetry. She is the author of Aphrodite (Routledge 2010), Big Screen Rome (Blackwell 2005), and In Pandora’s Jar: Lovesickness in Early Greek Poetry (Rowman & Littlefield 1995). She is the editor of Rome, Season Two: Trial and Triumph (Edinburgh 2015), Screening Love and Sex in the Ancient World (Palgrave Macmillan 2013), Rome, Season One: History Makes Television (Blackwell 2008), and co-editor of Classical Myth on Screen (with Meredith E. Safran, Palgrave Macmillan 2015), and STARZ Spartacus: Reimagining an Icon on Screen (with Antony Augoustakis, Edinburgh University Press 2017). She has published numerous essays and gives lectures around the world on the representation of classical antiquity on film and television. She has served as an academic consultant on several recent film and television productions.
Will Desmond
is a lecturer in the Department of Ancient Classics at Maynooth University. He has published in Greek historiography, literature and philosophy, notably the monographs The Greek Praise of Poverty (University of Notre Dame Press 2006), Cynics (Acumen/University of California Press, 2008), Philosopher-Kings of Antiquity(Continuum/Bloomsbury 2011) and Hegel’s Antiquity (Oxford University Press 2020).
Matthew Dillon
is Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of New England, Armidale, Australia. He writes mainly on Greek religion, with a recent monograph, Omens and Oracles. Divination in Ancient Greece (Routledge 2017). He is the author of textbooks on classical Greece and Republican Rome.
Frances Foster
teaches at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. Her work straddles the reception of antiquity at two distinct points: reception within Late Antiquity (specifically within education and the commentaries of Servius) and within children’s literature in the last 50 years. She has published in Classical Quarterly, Language and History, Foundation, and contributed to books such as Once and Future Antiquities in Science Fiction and Fantasy (eds Brett M. Rogers
T. H. M. Gellar-Goad
is Associate Professor of Classics and Zachary T. Smith Fellow at Wake Forest University. He specializes in Latin poetry, especially the funny stuff: Roman comedy, Roman erotic elegy, Roman satire, and – if you believe him – the allegedly philosophical poet Lucretius. He is author of Laughing Atoms, Laughing Matter: Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura and Satire (University of Michigan Press 2020) and PLAUTUS: Curculio (forthcoming, Bloomsbury).
Joel Gordon
has recently completed his PhD in Classics at the University of Otago, New Zealand, entitled Opening up the world below: A new ‘reading’ of ancient Greek eschatological topography. More broadly, Joel’s research interests include the reception of classical myth in popular culture with his MA thesis, from Victoria University of Wellington (NZ) entitled, Who the hell is Hades?: An examination of Hades’ reception in modern film, and an article in the Classical Receptions Journal, ‘When Superman smote Zeus: Analysing violent deicide in popular culture’. Joel has also been an entry writer for the Our Mythical Childhood Survey specializing in Australasian film and television, in particular the New Zealand franchise, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys.
Stephe Harrop
is Senior Lecturer in Drama at Liverpool Hope University. Her research largely centres upon Greek tragedy in contemporary re-performance, and recent publications include Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor (with Zachary Dunbar, Palgrave Macmillan 2018), and ‘Greek Tragedy, Agonistic Space, and Contemporary Performance’ (New Theatre Quarterly 2018). Her previous work on Herakles includes ‘Grounded, Heracles and the Gorgon’s Gaze’ (Arion 2015) and ‘Ercles’ Vein: Heracles as Bottom in Ted Hughes’ Alcestis’ (Classical Receptions Journal 2014). Stephe also co-edited (with Edith Hall) Theorising Performance: Greek Drama, Cultural History, and Critical Practice (Duckworth 2010).
Owen Hodkinson
is Associate Professor of Greek and Roman Cultures at the University of Leeds. His DPhil in Classics (Oxford 2009) was on Greek fictional letters of the Roman
Authority and Tradition in Philostratus’ Heroikos (Pensa 2011). Other publications in the field of classical receptions in children’s literature include ‘“His Greek Materials”: Philip Pullman’s uses of classical mythology’, in Katarzyna Marciniak (ed.) Our Mythical Childhood … The Classics and Literature for Children and Young Adults (Brill 2016: 267–90), ‘“She’s not deadly. She’s beautiful.” Reclaiming Medusa for Millennial Tween and Teen Girls?’, in Katarzyna Marciniak (ed.) Chasing Mythical Beasts: The Reception of the Ancient Monsters in Children’s and Young Adults’ Culture (Winter Verlag 2020), ‘Orphic Resonances of Love and Loss in David Almond’s A Song for Ella Grey’, in Katarzyna Marciniak (ed.) Our Mythical Hope in Children’s and Young Adults’ Culture (Warsaw University Press 2021).
Katherine Lu Hsu
is Assistant Professor of Classics at College of the Holy Cross. In addition to articles on Greek tragedy and myth, she is author of the monograph The Violent Hero: Heracles in the Greek Imagination (Bloomsbury 2021) and a volume co-edited with David Schur and Brian Sowers, The Body Unbound: Literary Approaches to the Classical Corpus (under contract with Palgrave Macmillan). She has also taught at Brooklyn College (City University of New York), where she directed the intensive Latin/Greek Institute.
Paula James
continues since retirement, and in the capacity of Open University Research Associate, to present and publish widely on Latin literature, Greek myth, and classical motifs on the big and small screen. She has since 2015 contributed chapters to Regine May and Stephen J. Harrison (eds) Cupid and Psyche: the Reception of Apuleius’ Love Story Since 1600 (De Gruyter 2020), focusing on film and television Beauty and the Beast narratives, and to Ricardo Apostol and Anastasia Bakogianni (eds) Locating Classical Receptions on Screen: Masks, Shadows and Echoes (Palgrave Macmillan 2018) entitled ‘Statues, Synths and Simulacra’, on Ovid’s Pygmalion vignette as an ancient and modern moving image. She is committed to the synergy between research and teaching that has informed all her academic activity.
teaches Classics at Leiden University. He has published a monograph on the ancient reception of Hesiod (The Other Poet, Brill 2010) and published several articles on archaic epic and reception of the classics. He is now working, with Glenn Most, on a translation of ancient and Byzantine exegetical texts on the Theogony.
Kleoniki Kyrkopoulou
studied History and Archaeology at the University of Thessaly. She holds an MA in Modern Greek History and Literature from King’s College London, and a MSc in Architecture and Museum Curatorial Studies from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She is now working as an Early Career Researcher at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Her research interests lie within the intersection of ancient and modern history, the reception of classical antiquity and classical archaeology, modern Greek literature, construction of national identity, the Greek Civil War, Greek radicalism, the unification of the Ionian islands, and the Italian Resorgimento. Her recent publications include an article on the Byzantine churches of Cephalonia and an article on the Roman decumanus in Thessaloniki and its discovery during the metro excavations.
Lisa Maurice
is Associate Professor in the Department of Classics at Bar-Ilan University, where her research focuses on the reception of the classical world in modern popular culture. She is the author of The Teacher in Ancient Rome (Lexington Books 2013), and of Screening Divinity (Edinburgh University Press 2019), as well as the editor of two volumes on the reception of the ancient world in popular culture – The Reception of Ancient Greece and Rome in Children’s Literature: Heroes and Eagles (Brill 2015), Rewriting the Ancient World: Greeks, Romans, Jews and Christians in Modern Popular Fiction (Brill 2017) - and co-editor of The Reception of Ancient Virtues and Vices in Modern Popular Culture (with Eran Almagor, Brill 2017). Another edited collection, Our Mythical Education, examining the use of classical mythology in formal education worldwide, is also forthcoming (University of Warsaw Press 2020) within the framework of the Our Mythical Childhood project (European Research Council Consolidator Grant 681202) http://www.omc.obta.al.uw.edu.pl/ (accessed 19 April 2020).
Andreas N. Michalopoulos
is Professor of Latin at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He is author of numerous works on Latin literature of the first centuries BC and AD (especially epic, elegy, and drama), including the monographs Ancient
modern reception of classical literature.
Charilaos N. Michalopoulos
is Assistant Professor of Latin at the Department of Greek Philology at Democritus University of Thrace. He studied Classics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the University of Leeds. He is the author of Myth, Language and Gender in the Corpus Priapeorum (Pedio 2014). His recent publications include articles on Augustan poetry, Roman epigram, modern Greek reception of Latin literature, Gender Studies and Classics.
Eleanor OKell
was the Hercules Project’s research assistant during its period of AHRC funding, and organised both the 2013 and 2017 conferences. She is author of articles on various of Sophocles’ tragedies, on Seneca’s Hercules Furens, on the reception of classical myth and history in nineteenth-century branding and twentieth-century film, and has a forthcoming chapter in the volume Hercules Performed; she has also published on pedagogic topics. She currently works for the NIHR Clinical Research Network Coordinating Centre, and is a University of Leeds Visiting Research Fellow in Classics.
Ayelet Peer
is a member of the Department of Classical Studies at Bar-Ilan University. She is the author of the monograph Julius Caesar’s Bellum Civile and the Composition of a New Reality (Ashgate 2015). She has written articles on Julius Caesar’s commentaries and on classical reception and is a member of the Our Mythical Childhood project, in conjunction with which she has developed and run mythological programmes for autistic children.
Patricia Salzman-Mitchell
is Professor in the Department of Classics and General Humanities at Montclair State University, NJ. Her fields of interest include Latin poetry, gender approaches to Classics, ancient motherhoods and Classical reception, especially on screen. She is the author of A Web of Fantasies. Gaze, Image and Gender in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (The Ohio State University Press, 2005), co-author, with Jean Alvares, of Classical Myth and Film in the New Millennium (Oxford
Clemence Schultze
wrote her DPhil thesis on the Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus, on whom she has published extensively. She had a career lecturing in Classics and Ancient History at Queen’s University Belfast and at Durham University. Her research interests lie in ancient historiography, the material culture of the classical world (specifically ancient textiles, their production and function) and classical reception in the literary and visual culture of nineteenth-century Britain and France. Having published a number of articles on novelist Charlotte M. Yonge’s interpretations of myth, she is now, in retirement, addressing Tractarian (‘Oxford Movement’) attitudes to the role of classical literature in education and society.
María Seijo-Richart
was born in A Coruña (Galicia, Spain), the Hercules-founded city which is the subject of her chapter. She has an International PhD in English (Film Adaptation) (2014) from the University of A Coruña. She also holds an MA in World Cinema from the University of Leeds (2003), where she currently works. One of her research interests is how oral tradition contributes to the discovery and preservation of the language and cultural heritage of subjugated communities. She has presented papers in several universities about Galician cinema and folklore.
Jon Solomon
Department of the Classics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is the Robert D. Novak Professor of Western Civilization and Culture. He works on the classical tradition in literature, opera, and cinema. His most recent publications are Volumes I & II of Boccaccio’s Genealogy of the Pagan Gods (I Tatti 2011 and 2017) and Ben-Hur: The Original Blockbuster (Edinburgh University Press 2016). Previous works include The Ancient World in the Cinema (2nd ed. Yale University Press 2001), Ancient Worlds in Film and Television (ed. with Almut-Barbara Renger, Metaforms 1, Brill 2012), The Complete Three Stooges (C3 Entertainment 2001), Ptolemy’s Harmonics (Brill 1999), and Up the University (with Robert C. Solomon, Addison-Wessely 1993).
is Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Leeds. She is author of numerous works on Greek myth, religion and iconography, including the monographs Herakles (Routledge 2012) and Worshipping Virtues: personification and the divine in ancient Greece (Classical Press of Wales/Duckworth 2000), and a volume co-edited with J.E. Herrin, Personification in the Greek World: from Antiquity to Byzantium (Centre for Hellenic Studies 7, Ashgate 2005). She is coordinator of the project Hercules: a Hero for All Ages (https://herculesproject.leeds.ac.uk/ accessed 05/01/2019), and co-editor with Arlene Allan and Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides of Herakles Inside and Outside the Church: from the first Apologists to the end of the Quattrocento (Metaforms 18, Brill 2020), and with Valerie Mainz of The Exemplary Hercules from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and Beyond (Metaforms 20, Brill 2020).
Sam Summers
is an Associate Lecturer in Animation History & Theory at Middlesex University. His research focuses on the commercial animation industry, and in particular the use of intertextual devices in animated features. He is the author of DreamWorks Animation: Intertextuality and Aesthetics in Shrek and Beyond (Palgrave 2020) and the co-editor of Toy Story: How Pixar Reinvented the Animated Feature (Bloomsbury 2018).
Rachael White
works in policy and law reform for the Government of New South Wales. She completed her doctorate on the reception of the classics in colonial Australia at Exeter College, Oxford in 2017, and was previously Associate Archivist at the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at the University of Oxford.
Michael Williams
is Professor of Film at the University of Southampton. He has published widely on film stardom and the cinematic uses of the ancient past. He is author of Film Stardom and the Ancient Past: Idols, Artefacts and Epics (Palgrave Macmillan 2018) and Film Stardom, Myth and Classicism: The Rise of the Hollywood Gods (Palgrave Macmillan 2013). He is also author of Ivor Novello: Screen Idol (BFI 2003) and co-editor of British Silent Cinema and the Great War (Palgrave Macmillan 2011).
FHEA, is a Senior Research Associate (University of Bristol), an Adjunct Lecturer (Hellenic Open University), and a Research Associate in Pindaric Studies (CHS Washington DC, Harvard University). Her current research focuses on the cultural construction and social use of eunoia in fourth-century BCE honorary decrees (https://hellenic.princeton.edu/people/maria-xanthou). She is also completing her commentary on Pindar’s epinician odes to be published by Harvard CHS. Her main publications include a commentary on Isocrates’ On the Peace and Against the Sophists, a monograph on the use of asyndeton in Pindar and Bacchylides, and numerous articles on archaic choral poetry (Stesichorus, Pindar), Attic Comedy (Aristophanes), nineteenth-century German classical scholarship, the history of emotions, and e-learning. She has been awarded individual research scholarships and research visiting fellowships from the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies (Princeton University), the Center for Hellenic Studies Washington DC (Harvard University), the University of Oxford, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki’s Academic Excellence Scheme, the Hellenic State Scholarships Foundation, and the Nicos and Lydia Trichas Foundation for Education and European Culture.