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Recent works have pointed out the problem of fusing ancient and medieval categories of peoplehood, demonstrating the need for scholars to conceptualize more dynamic ways of thinking about identity in the premodern world.

The systematic study of ancient material remains is often argued to have played a key role in the emergence of the modern (18th -19th century) disciplinary formation of classics as the comprehensive study of the ancient world from earlier humanist paradigms focused primarily on explicating and imitating classical literature or deriving ethical instruction from history (see e.g. Schnapp 1993; Harloe 2013).

The staple stories of Greek tragic drama—Oedipus and his family, the internecine Atreid House, or the Trojan War with its preliminaries and aftermath— are theatrical instantiations of an infinitely malleable material, which has been subjected for centuries to innumerable forms of telling and retelling in a variety of media (Mee and Foley 2011, Michelakis 2013, Nikoloutsos 2013, Bosher et al 2015, Liapis and Sidiropoulou 2021).

Calls to “decolonize” the discipline of Classics have resounded across the field. Yet, as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012) have reminded us, the goal of decolonization is indigenous repatriation – “decolonization” itself should not be used as a metaphor for other social changes. What exactly is meant when we wield the term “decolonize?” What historical contexts and structural forces are we critiquing and how are we doing so? What future are we envisioning for the discipline and for whom?

While everyone knows Alexander Pope’s translations of Homer were important and influential, this paper explores the material and visual dimensions of his first subscription editions to underscore certain less well-known facts. First, Pope was very much the artist of the deal in his arrangements with his publisher, and because of the unique contract he made for an exclusive subscription edition, he became one of the first translators in Europe to get rich exclusively off the sales of a translation project (McLaverty 1993, Foxon 1991).

This paper studies the intersection of hypertext and paratext in the cover art of adaptations of Homer’s Iliad: Dolan’s The War Nerd Iliad and Barker’s The Silence of the Girls. Both covers feature original artwork: by the surrealist C.M. Kösemen (Dolan), and the printmaker Sarah Young (Barker). Both artists draw on the visual styles of Greek vase painting but invest them with modern visual codes that complicate each author’s engagement with the gendered dynamics of Homer.

The Constantinian poet Optatian is the first author known to have written versus intexti (“interwoven verses”), a special form of picture poems.

Translating the Mythical Female Body in the Graphic Novel: Emil Ferris’ My Favorite Thing Is Monsters

This paper examines the use of queer emphasis in my translation of Euripides’s Helen combined with visualization of performance context to bring out queer and trans themes such as embodiment and alienated identity. The first part is a reflection on the project itself—to translate Helen’s Helen as a trans woman—and its inspiration.

Translation is a kind of reception or perhaps reception is a kind of translation. The boundaries between the two are porous and there are competing definitions and approaches to these “twin” activities (see, e.g., Lianeri, 2019). Jacobson’s phrase “intersemiotic translation,” cited in the CFP for this panel, foregrounds the fluidity or changeability of the medium, recognizing that translation can occur from one system of meaning or language, verbal or visual, to another.