Athena: Sharing Current Research - initial Notice and Call for Papers

As promised in my previous message, of yesterday, here's the notice I put out via the Classicists List, together with a few annotations.

Initial notice and cfp

Friday June 3rd 2016 (provisional times - 10am-4pm). I'll confirm these once I have a sense of how many potential speakers there are - from initial responses, we look set to have a really good number, and range of participants.

Adam Room, Grove House, University of Roehampton, London This is an ideal location for the event for reasons I'll explain in a future posting.

*All welcome, especially postgraduate students*

This one-day event will share current research on a deity that has been a topic of interest since the dawn of classical scholarship and through its various ‘turns.’ The conference will appraise various ways to approach the goddess by drawing together researchers from the UK, France, Italy, and, we hope, elsewhere. The event takes place at a time of a resurgence of interest in the goddess (evidenced, for instance, by the 2016 edition of the journal Pallas devoted to Athena-related papers). The event aims both to reflect and appraise this renewed interest.

Envisaged themes to include:

• Athena the networker – polytheism, the pantheon and the ‘Paris School’
• Athena in the city – in antiquity and beyond
• Gendering Athena
• Attributes of Athena
• Athena as warrior deity

Other suggestions welcome!

If you would like to offer a paper (of c. 20 minutes), please send title plus c. 200-word abstract to Susan Deacy (s.deacy@roehampton.ac.uk) by 30 April 2016.

Also email Susan Deacy if you would like to be added to the contact list for the event.

We're tweeting

We're now tweeting about conference and other Athena-related matters as @AthenaSharing   

The time is right - announcing new direction for this blog

I'm pleased to announce a new focus for this blog - at least for the next few months. I'm currently organising a one-day conference on Athena, to take place at Roehampton on 6th June 2016. I shall use this blog for news related to the event, for example about the venue and about the contributors.

The idea for the conference came about pretty organically. I'd invited a PhD student from Toulouse working on receptions of Athena to Roehampton to give a paper. One of the current Roehampton PhD students has already written a (soon-to-be-published) paper on the goddess. Another Roehampton PhD student will be giving an Athena-related paper at this year's Classical Association conference along with a colleague from Venice. So: I was struck that there were already, potentially, four papers. Then, another PhD student wrote to me, this time from Manchester Met, to discuss an aspect of his research that bore on Athena. At this point I felt convinced that the time was right for an Athena event. When, shortly after this, a second PhD student in France contacted me, I felt even more confirmed in this thinking.

I'm arranging the event with one of our research groups at Roehampton - the Renaissance and Classical Studies Research Group. There is also a potential fit with the newly established Violence Research Group in the Dept of Humanities, and with the well-established Research Group in Sex. Gender and Sexuality.

I sent a cfp to the UK-based Classicists List last week, and this has generated most-welcome interest. I'll include the text of this Call in my next posting.

I hope to share the names of the PhD students identified above in due course - I just want to clear with them first that they're okay with this...