Katarzyna Marciniak (University of Warsaw)
The paper offers insight into the stages and activities undertaken within the international and multidisciplinary programme Our Mythical Childhood, with a special focus on the Our Mythical Childhood Survey – a database of works inspired by ancient culture and intended for children and young adults.
Established in 2011 at the University of Warsaw, the Our Mythical Childhood programme is a global endeavour conducted by a community of scholars representing wide-ranging backgrounds in terms of geography (Australia, Belarus, Cameroon, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, New Zealand, Poland, UK, USA, and Switzerland) and methodology (archaeology, children’s literature, classics, history, modern philologies, neuropsychiatry, reception studies). The programme was supported by a Loeb Classical Library Foundation Grant (2012-2013), the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Alumni Award for Innovative Networking Initiatives (2014-2017), and a European Research Council Consolidator Grant (2016-2022).
The premise of Our Mythical Childhood consists in approaching Classical Antiquity not as a distant and petrified past, but as a living cultural experience in the process of continuous reinterpretations wherever civilization rooted in Graeco-Roman tradition has reached down through the ages. Thus, its reception in children’s and young adults’ culture can serve as a tool that permits us to gain new insight into identity-building processes and the key political, cultural, and social transformations underway across the world. Within this kind of approach, it is of paramount importance to expand beyond the Western optics that still dominate the popular understanding of ancient culture. Hence we include regional perspectives without the pejorative implication of regional being inferior. On the contrary, we recognize variety within regions as extremely valuable contexts for the reception of the Classics.
It is precisely this approach that has been implemented in one of our major tasks – the database Our Mythical Childhood Survey. It contains over 1,500 double-peer-reviewed entries from over forty countries. In my presentation I will show the origins, the development, and the functions of the Survey, along with its place in the programme Our Mythical Childhood. I will do so against the backdrop of our other ventures aimed at supporting inclusive education, inspiring broad collaboration beyond the boundaries of the University, and strengthening bridges between various cultural traditions. I will explain how all these elements complement each other and, reinforced as they are by universal interest in childhood among contemporary societies, how they permit us to strive for the establishment of a new holistic model of work within the Humanities on the frontiers of research, education, and culture.