The Poetics of War

A total of 27 papers were delivered to this memorable conference remembering conflict from the Ancient World until the recent history of the First World War. The event attracted a wide range of ancient and modern historians and classicists, leading experts on their fields and the programme included a wide diversity of themes relating to remembering conflict. We lined up an impressive cluster of stellar scholars from all over the world (the USA, Russia, Continental Europe, Australia, the UK and Ireland). The participants included senior international academics as well as a number of postgraduates who were assisted to attend by means of bursaries thanks to the generous contribution of our sponsors.

Wednesday 17th June

Session 1: Greece

War Heroes and long lasting topoi in Hellenistic Poetry and funerary epitaphs

Silvia Barbantani, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano

Remembering Marathon: Gaps and Distortions in the Commemoration of War with Persia

Margaret Miller, University of Sydney

The dark side of war: veterans and dissenters in the Athenian Theatre of the late fifth century

Lucia Cecchet

Granddad's Army: political dynamic memories and intergenerational relations

Matthew Shipton

A Memory of the Athenian defeat at Chaeronea: Some exempla of Patriotism and Treason in Greek Orators

Eduard Rung

Experiencing wars and reading fragments: ancient and modern reception of Pindar's Theban Hyporchem (fr.110-109 S-M)

Francesca Modini

Keynote: Ypres and the Limits of War Poetry: David Jones' 'In Parenthesis'

Edith Hall

Thursday 18th June

Session 2: Rome

Consensus and conflict. Remembering defeat in ancient Rome

Ida Östenberg

Marcus Antonius: The Alternative Princeps

Kathryn Welch, University of Sydney

The Landscape of a 'Great War': Remembering the Battle of Actium in the Ambracian Gulf

Bettina Reitz-Joosse

Nulla dies umquam memori vos eximet aero: sacrifice, remembrance, and forgiveness in the Virgilian Poetics of War

Elina Anna Sylvia Pyy

Virgil's Carthaginian Poetics: The Civil Punic Wars as Unspeakable

Elena Giusti

Session 3: Receptions of the Classical

'As though one were involved in the origin of some classic myth': Youth, Beauty, Self-sacrifice, and Classics in the Great War

Elizabeth Vandiver, Whitman College

In Flanders Fields: Landscape and Memory

Charlie Kerrigan

Binyon's Simonides: The Relationship between Simonides' Encomium to the Dead at Thermopylae and Binyon's For the Fallen

Peter Davies and Harriet Lander

Acts of Misremembrance: Forgetting the Classical Past in Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End

David Scourfield, Maynooth

Memories of War, Ancient and Modern, in Tolkien's 'Passage of the Marshes'

Marian Makins

Keynote: 'From Macedonia's madman to the Swede': Memories of War in Northern Europe, c. 1520-1980

Ritchie Robertson

Friday 19th June

Session 4: Imperial Wars

Military Men of Feeling: Sensibility, Sentimentality and Soldiering in the Crimean War

Holly Furneaux, University of Leicester

Faces of History: Crimean Legacies and Victorian Veterans at the Fin-de-Siecle

Lara Kriegel, Indiana

Buried Treasure and Unburied Bones: Memories of Imperial War in East Africa

Felicitas Becker, Cambridge

Re-reading revolution: poetry, translation and the formation of socialist identity in Commonweal (1885-1891)

Ingrid Hanson

Remembering the women who were left behind: Naomi Mitchison's Cloud Cuckoo Land and female experiences of war

Emma Bridges

Session 5: The Great War

Tin Wreaths and Broken Statues: Ezra Pound, Commemoration and the Classical Text

Rowena Fowler

The Unknown and Known Dead

Tim Armstrong, RHUL

Remembering another world: the denied future in British and American Great War poetry

J. Alison Rosenblitt

'The factory of wounds': Homer and the Absence of the Wounded from Australia's Official History of the Great War

Rachael White

Concluding Remarks

Concluding Remarks

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Sunday 29th May 2016

The organisers are delighted to say that they are working on the conference proceedings aiming to edit the content and produce a volume based on the lectures of a very stimulating and highly academic event.

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