Edith Hall was born in Birmingham and attended school in Nottingham.[2] She won a major open scholarship to Wadham College, Oxford, where she studied for a BA degree in classics and modern languages.[1] She gained first class honours in 1982, and went on to a DPhil degree at St Hugh's College, Oxford, which she completed in 1988.[1] Her doctoral thesis was awarded the Hellenic Foundation Prize.[7]
During her time at Royal Holloway, she set up and directed the Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome.[citation needed] She resigned over a dispute about funding for classics after leading a campaign to prevent cuts to, or the closure of, the Royal Holloway classics department.[8] She was quoted as saying "You cannot have a serious university without the study of the Greeks and Romans, as Terry Eagleton has said. It is a tragedy because we were really building something here".[8]
When a lecturer at Oxford in 1996 Hall co-founded, with Oliver Taplin, the interdisciplinary Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama. The project collects and analyses materials related to the staging and influence of classical plays. The project's ten co-edited volumes, of which Hall is lead editor of seven and contributor to nine, have been described as playing "a pivotal role in establishing the parameters and methodologies of the study of the reception of Classical drama in performance".[9]Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre 1660–1914, by Hall and Fiona Macintosh, came out of the project. It was shortlisted for the Theatre Society Book of the Year Prize, the J.D. Criticos prize and the Runciman Award.[citation needed]
In 2012 Hall was awarded a Humboldt Research Prize to study ancient Greek theatre in the Black Sea.[10]
Hall researches ancient Greek literature, especially Homer, tragedy, comedy, satyr drama, ancient literary criticism and rhetoric, Herodotus and Xenophon, although her publications discuss many other ancient authors including Lucian, Plutarch, Artemidorus, Menander, Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle, and other ancient evidence including metre and versification, papyri, painted pottery and inscriptions. She is an expert on classical reception – the ways in which ancient culture and history have informed later epochs, whether in later antiquity or modernity, and whether in fiction, drama, cinema, poetry, political theory, or philosophy. Her research has been influential in three areas: the understanding of the performance of literature in the ancient theatre and its role in society, the representation of ethnicity; the uses of Classical culture in European education, identity, and political theory.[citation needed]
Ancient theatre and society
Several of her books argue that theatre plays an important role in intellectual and cultural history, especially because entertainments reach lower-status audiences. These include Greek and Roman Actors (2002, with P. E. Easterling), and The Theatrical Cast of Athens (2006), which incorporates a revisiting of Inventing the Barbarian in the light of developments in international history since 1989.[clarification needed]New Directions in Ancient Pantomime (2008), the first study of the performance of mythological narratives which educated mass audiences across the ancient Mediterranean world for several centuries, was praised by D. Feeney, professor of Latin at Princeton University, as "indispensable for all students of the Roman Empire".[13] Her book, Greek Tragedy: Suffering under the Sun, argues that Greek tragedy is a philosophical medium, includes an essay on every surviving ancient Greek tragedy and has been described as "admirably exhaustive".[14] Her 2013 book Adventures with Iphigenia in Tauris: A Cultural History of Euripides' Black Sea Tragedy is a history of the impact of a tragedy by Euripides, covering its presence in vase-painting, Aristotle, Latin poetry, Pompeian murals, Roman imperial sarcophagi and literature including the ancient novel and Lucianic dialogue.
From 1996 to 2003, Hall contributed to the Oxford World's Classics Euripides series, which included all nineteen of Euripides' extant plays, newly translated by James Morwood and Robin Waterfield. Hall provided the introductions to each of the five volumes, drawing out the modern parallels with the texts. In the introduction to Bacchae and Other Plays, she explored Euripides' supposed "radicalism", quoting the critic F. L. Lucas: "not Ibsen, not Voltaire, not Tolstoi ever forged a keener weapon in defence of womanhood, in defiance of superstition, in denunciation of war, than the Medea, the Ion, the Trojan Women".[15]
Ethnicity
Hall's first monograph, Inventing the Barbarian (1989), argued that ancient European identity relied on the stereotyping as 'other' of an Asiatic enemy. Her argument that ancient ideas about ethnicity underlie modern questions of nationalism, racism and ethnic self-determination has been influential in classics, and regarded as "seminal" by scholars in other fields.[16][17][18] This work was developed in her scholarly commentary on the Greek text of Aeschylus' Persians, with English translation (1996), and in the essay collection she edited Cultural Responses to the Persian Wars (2007).
Classics and society
Hall's research has incorporated later cultural history, especially the social role played by the presence of ancient Greece and Rome. Her books in this area include The Return of Ulysses: a Cultural History of Homer's Odyssey (2008), noted by The New York Times for its scholarship and accessibility.[19] This was followed by two collections of essays on ancient slavery and one on the uses and abuses of Greek and Roman texts and ideas in the relationship between India and Britain 1757–2007.
Hall is the principal investigator for The People's History of Classics, a project which presents and amplifies the voices of British working-class women and men who engaged with ancient Greek and Roman culture between 1789 and 1917. This developed from a research project based at King's College, London, called Classics and Class in Britain 1789-1917.[20] Hall delivered the J P Barron Memorial Lecture at the Institute of Classical Studies in 2017 on Classicist Foremothers and Why They Matter.[21] She advocates the teaching of classics, including classical civilisation as well as languages, in British state schools.[3]
Hall has been married and divorced, and has two daughters.[3][26] She has had family members die by suicide, and has written about this in Facing down the Furies: Suicide, the Ancient Greeks, and Me (2024).[3]Rowan Williams, writing in the New Statesman, called it a "remarkable, brave and compassionate book".[27]
Selected publications
Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (OUP, 1989)
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