Audio/Visual Romans: Julius Caesar in popular culture

The imaginative power of modern audio/visual media to shape our perception of the past is widely acknowledged. For consumers across the globe, it is often in A/V media that they find their most personal and seemingly authentic experience of Rome, and their visits to the city have thus been charged with A/V memories of the past.

Julius Caesar is the most famous Roman of them all. He is also closely associated with the city of Rome and that relationship is regularly represented and commemorated. Utilising a range of activities and addressing a variety of constituencies (through an academic colloquium and two student-oriented workshops), this project explores the ways in which Julius Caesar has been, and continues to be, brought back to the city of Rome and embodied in popular culture - both visually and aurally.

A roundtable discussion of Julius Caesar in popular culture will offer the opportunity for exchange between academics with very different disciplinary specialisms (Classics, Comparative Literature, Archaeology, History, Film and Media Studies, Italian and English literature, Intercultural Studies and Translation Studies). The workshops will provide students from UCL, Roma Tre, Sapienza and the British School at Rome) with the opportunity to collaborate in an exercise of audio-describing scenes from Caesar’s popular cultural representations and in analysis of the audio-visual capture of a recent Italian production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

Area

History, Latin

UCL leads

• Professor Maria Wyke, Department of Greek & Latin