‘The Global Rhetoric of Antiquity’
18–19 June 2026
Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford
This year, the Janus Project conference welcomes papers exploring the roles, imaginations, and uses of ‘antiquity’, especially as conceived and canonised as ‘Classics’, in cross-cultural exchange and comparison. In the 16th–19th c. encounters between Europe and East Asia, the antiquities of both contexts exerted strong influence on the cross-cultural exchange that took place through the Jesuit missions. Whether through translations, ethnographies, histories, grammars, or even pure belles lettres, the ancient literatures of Greece/Rome and of Sinographic spheres and the intellectual traditions arising from those texts were important ‘canons’ through which and with reference to which communication, whether intercultural or intracultural, occurred. Confucius was presented to Europe, for example, as an alter Cicero or alter Seneca through allusions to Roman texts in the translation strategies of the Confucius Sinarum Philosophus, which brought the Confucian canon to Latinate audiences. The Jesuit poems Paciecid and Ruggeriad donned the stylings of Virgil to epicise the Society’s mission work in Japan and China as well as the peoples and landscapes of those countries. On the other hand, Christianity was presented to China as slotting perfectly into the Confucian tradition. Jesuits, writing catechetical and philosophical texts like Ricci’s Twenty-five Sayings (二十五言 Ershiwuyan), engaged not only Confucian terms but also contemporary debates among Chinese literati concerning those terms. Michele Ruggieri composed poems on theological matters in close imitation of the Poems of a Thousand Masters (千家詩 Qianjiashii). In many ways, the distance of time became a more familiarly traversable surrogate for the distance of space. Cross-cultural writing in this era was also a quasi-prototype for the fields of comparative history and comparative literature. The focus of the conference will be on Greece, Rome, and East Asia, but other global approaches are welcomed as well. How can ‘Classics’ be conceptualised in a cross-cultural context? How is the notion of ‘canon’ or ‘antiquity’ or ‘Classics’ persuasive? How can a culture-specific notion of ‘canon’ be translated? How does comparison between conceptions of antiquity and ‘Classical’ traditions shape our modern understanding of disciplinary bounds? The 2026 Janus Project Conference encourages scholars across various disciplines, including but not limited to history, Classics, East Asian studies, comparative literature, and translation studies, to join us in exploring these and related questions.
Keynotes TBA.
This year’s conference is co-sponsored with Korea University’s Institute for Sinographic Literatures and Philology and Institute for Global Humanities Research and Collaboration.
Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words to admin@janus-project.org by 1May 2026. If you have any questions, do reach out to cynthia.liu@classics.ox.ac.uk and kai.chen@balliol.ox.ac.uk.
Note: this is not a Classical Association event – please contact the organisers directly with any enquiries.