‘Ecocritical Approaches to Ancient Performance Culture’
Ritson Room, 38 North Bailey, Durham University
22nd-23rd April 2026
This international conference, convened in the Department of Classics and Ancient History by Durham PhD candidate Emma Bentley and Professor Edith Hall, and financially supported by the University of Durham, explores the particular relationship between the contexts, texts, sensory dimensions and afterlives of ancient performance culture and the natural world. The conference will be hybrid.
If you would like to attend either in person or virtually, please email emma.bentley@durham.ac.uk by April 2nd.
Programme:
Wednesday 22nd April
0900 Registration
Greek Drama
0930 Natasha Ferreira (NWU, South Africa), Voices of the Land in Attic Tragedy: Mere Personification, or Something More?
1000 Andreas Prasinos (Glasgow), Prometheus Bound and the Ecology of Hubris
1030 Margaret Tighe (Oxford), A Mimetic Ecology: Sounding the Natural World in Euripides’ Phaethon
1100 Coffee Break
1130 Roderick Zoe (UCLA), The Lyre, Impressions, and The Production of the Animal in Sophocles’ Trackers
1200 Arnaud Zucker (Côte-d’Azur), Observing Nature to Reimagine the Polis: An Ecocritical Perspective on the Naturalism of Aristophanes’ Birds.
Performing in a Material World
1230 Michael Loy (Durham), The Environmental Impact of Building a Theatre: an Archaeological Perspective
1300 Lunch Break
1400 Niklas Betterman (Heidelberg), Between Stage and Soil: Resource Conflicts and Tree Protection in Ancient Greece
1430 Joel Christensen (CUNY Graduate Centre), The Uses of the Earth: Myth and the Fantasy of Abundance in Ancient Performance Culture
Creative Initiatives
1500 Magdalena Zira (Fantastiko Theatre), Old Men in a Grove Without Trees: a New Play for a Chorus of Narrators?
1530 David Bullen (RHUL), Frogs, Turtles, and Trees: Ecocultural Approaches to Staging and Teaching Ancient Greek Drama
1600 Alison Sharrock (Manchester) Erysichthon, the Opera
1630 Tea Break
1700 Alicia Stallings (Oxford) Keynote
1900 Conference Dinner
Thursday April 23rd
Roman Drama
1000 Andrew Fox (Liverpool), Modelling Tree Literacy on the Roman Stage
1030 Meg Challis (Melbourne), de macula rusticitate: Examining the Negative Connotations of Nature in Plautine Insults.
1100 Joe Droegemueller (Michigan), mare quidem commune certost omnibus: An Ecocritical Approach to the Sea in Plautus’ Rudens
1130 Coffee break
1200 Eleonora Tola (Cordoba), Maiusque mari Medea malum: Medea’s Ecocritical Reasons in Seneca’s Tragedy
1230 Jason Koenig (St Andrews), ‘Planetary Viewing in Seneca’s Hercules’
1300 Lunch Break
Non-Theatrical Texts
1400 Georgos Lenos & Sofia Giapantantzali (Democritus Univ. of Thrace) Nature as Stage and Actor: Ecocritical Readings of Mimesis in Theocritus
1430 Bill Freeman (Cambridge), Setting the Scaena: Emergent Artifice in Ovid’s Environments
1500 Emily Rushton (Cambridge), ‘Hast thou heard my moans?’: a Posthumanist Reading of Shakespeare’s Enactment of Ovidian Wall and Woods.
1530 Roberto di Tuccio (Durham), Erotic Ecologies: Sex Workers, Performance, and the Natural World in Alciphron’s Letters
1600 Tea Break
1630 Christoph Schliephake (Augsburg), The Matter of the Earth and/as Performance: The Example of Naphtha in Plutarch’s Alexander
1730 Reception and Launch of Classical Encounters in England’s North East, ed. E. Hall, Rory McInnes-Gibbons and Edmund Thomas (Routledge Taylor Francis).
Note: this is not a Classical Association event – please contact the organisers directly with any enquiries.