Edith Hall

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Professor Edith Hall
Professor Edith Hall

Professor Edith Hall (born 1959) is a British scholar of classics and cultural history, and holds a joint Research Chair in Classics and Drama at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she directs the Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome. She also co-directs a research project at Oxford University and is Chairman of the Gilbert Murray Trust. Her prizewinning doctoral thesis was awarded at Oxford in 1988.

Described by the poet Colin Teevan as ‘the Thierry Henry of Classics’[1], Professor Hall has focussed her research on racism, sexism and class prejudice in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, and first came to prominence as the only classicist to criticise Martin Bernal for his controversial Black Athena on the grounds that it was not radical enough.[2] Professor Hall is known for her comic approach to lecturing.

She has made many TV and radio appearances as well as acting as consultant for professional theatre productions, and is an advocate of ‘Classical Reception’ – studying the ancient world through the way that its culture has been received by later epochs, whether in fiction, drama, cinema, or philosophy.

Professor Hall was also the model for Ethel Spurgeon, the hard-drinking feminist, revolutionary and sleuth who is the heroine of Stephen Prasher's novel The Cellar at the Top of the Stairs[3], even down to the details that she had studied Classics at Oxford and was the daughter of an Anglican priest and a professional flower arranger. She was also the model for the goddess Hera in the stage play by Colin Teevan, Alcmaeon in Corinth.

She is married to freelance journalist Richard Poynder.

[edit] Selected publications

  • Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (OUP 1989)
  • Sophocles’ Antigone, Oedipus the King, Electra (OUP 1994)
  • Aeschylus’ Persians: Edited with Translation and Commentary (1996)
  • Dionysus since 69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium (2004)
  • Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre 1660-1914 (2005, with Fiona Macintosh)
  • The Theatrical Cast of Athens: Interactions between Ancient Greek Drama & Society (2006)
  • The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer’s Odyssey (2007)

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  1. ^ Unpublished radio drama on the topic of the British classics community, 2003
  2. ^ When Is a Myth Not a Myth?: Bernal's "Ancient Model", in Black Athena Revisited (edited by Mary R Lefkowitz & Guy MacLean Rogers, University of North Carolina Press, 1996)
  3. ^ The Cellar at the Top of the Stairs, Stephen Prasher, Heinemann, London, 1988
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