Emma Stafford | |
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 Professor Stafford in 2022 | |
| Nationality | British |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | University of Cambridge, University College London |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Culture of Greece,Classical reception studies |
| Institutions | University of Leeds |
| Notable works | Worshipping Virtues:Personification and the Divine in Ancient Greece |
Emma Stafford is Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Leeds. [1] Her work focuses on Heracles/Hercules and his reception.
Stafford read classics at New Hall,University of Cambridge (1987–90) and began her PhD at University College London in 1991. [1] Following appointments at Royal Holloway,Birkbeck,the University of Leicester,and the University of Wales,Lampeter,Stafford moved to the University of Leeds in 2000 and became a Senior Lecturer in 2005.
Stafford was appointed Professor of Greek Culture in 2020,becoming the first female professor of Classics at the University of Leeds. [2]
Stafford's work focuses on Greek cultural history and she specialises in myth,allegory,personification,religion,and the reception of Greek culture. [3] She has worked extensively on the myth and reception of Hercules,including numerous publications through research at the University of Leeds,much of which,like Herculean Labours:enriching the public understanding of our classical mythological heritage (2005-2012) has a public engagement dimension. [4]
Building on previous work on Hercules,Stafford now leads the AHRC funded Hercules:a Hero for all Ages project,which aims to chart the significance of the reception of Hercules from the late antique period to modern times. [5] [6] As part of her work,Stafford has spoken widely on the subject including public lectures at Leeds City Museum. [7]
The Hercules Project has extensive public outreach activities,including a new musical drama,Herakles,composed by Tim Benjamin which premiered in Todmorden Town Hall in April 2017. [8] [9] [10] [11] Stafford also coordinated The Labours of Herakles touring exhibition,displayed at Leeds City Museum and the Museum of Classical Archaeology,Cambridge,featuring the work of Marian Maguire. [12] [13]
Hercules is the Roman equivalent of the Greek divine hero Heracles, son of Jupiter and the mortal Alcmena. In classical mythology, Hercules is famous for his strength and for his numerous far-ranging adventures.
Heracles, born Alcaeus or Alcides, was a divine hero in Greek mythology, the son of Zeus and Alcmene, and the foster son of Amphitryon. He was a descendant and half-brother of Perseus. He was the greatest of the Greek heroes, the ancestor of royal clans who claimed to be Heracleidae (Ἡρακλεῖδαι), and a champion of the Olympian order against chthonic monsters. In Rome and the modern West, he is known as Hercules, with whom the later Roman emperors, in particular Commodus and Maximian, often identified themselves. Details of his cult were adapted to Rome as well.
In Greek mythology, Kratos, also known as Cratus or Cratos, is the divine personification of strength. He is the son of Pallas and Styx. Kratos and his siblings Nike ('Victory'), Bia ('Force'), and Zelus ('Glory') are all the personification of a specific trait. Kratos is first mentioned alongside his siblings in Hesiod's Theogony. According to Hesiod, Kratos and his siblings dwell with Zeus because their mother Styx came to him first to request a position in his regime, so he honored her and her children with exalted positions. Kratos and his sister Bia are best known for their appearance in the opening scene of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound. Acting as agents of Zeus, they lead the captive Titan Prometheus on stage. Kratos compels the mild-mannered blacksmith god Hephaestus to chain Prometheus to a rock as punishment for his theft of fire.
In Greco-Roman mythology, Leuce, also spelled Leuke, was a nymph, an Oceanid; a daughter of the Titan Oceanus and his wife, Tethys.
In Greek mythology, Peitho is the personification of persuasion. She is typically presented as an important companion of Aphrodite. Her opposite is Bia, the personification of force. As a personification, she was sometimes imagined as a goddess and sometimes an abstract power with her name used both as a common and proper noun. There is evidence that Peitho was referred to as a goddess before she was referred to as an abstract concept, which is rare for a personification. Peitho represents both sexual and political persuasion. She is associated with the art of rhetoric.
The Farnese Hercules is an ancient statue of Hercules made in the early third century AD and signed by Glykon, who is otherwise unknown; he was an Athenian but he may have worked in Rome. Like many other Ancient Roman sculptures it is a copy or version of a much older Greek original that was well known, in this case a bronze by Lysippos that would have been made in the fourth century BC. This original survived for over 1500 years until it was melted down by Crusaders in 1205 during the Sack of Constantinople. The enlarged copy was made for the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, where the statue was recovered in 1546, and is now in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples. The heroically-scaled Hercules is one of the most famous sculptures of antiquity, and has fixed the image of the mythic hero in the European imagination.
Personification is the representation of a thing or abstraction as a person. It is, in other words, considered an embodiment or an incarnation. In the arts, many things are commonly personified. These include numerous types of places, especially cities, countries, and continents, elements of the natural world such as the trees or four seasons, four elements, four cardinal winds, five senses, and abstractions such as virtues, especially the four cardinal virtues and seven deadly sins, the nine Muses, or death.
Herakles is an Athenian tragedy by Euripides that was first performed c. 416 BC. While Heracles is in the underworld obtaining Cerberus for one of his labours, his father Amphitryon, wife Megara, and children are sentenced to death in Thebes by Lycus. Heracles arrives in time to save them, though the goddesses Iris and Madness (personified) cause him to kill his wife and children in a frenzy. It is the second of two surviving tragedies by Euripides where the family of Heracles are suppliants. It was first performed at the City Dionysia festival.
In Greek mythology, Megara was a Theban princess and the first wife of the hero Heracles.
Edith Hall, is a British scholar of classics, specialising in ancient Greek literature and cultural history, and professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University. She is a Fellow of the British Academy. From 2006 until 2011 she held a chair at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she founded and directed the Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome until November 2011. She resigned over a dispute regarding funding for classics after leading a public campaign, which was successful, to prevent cuts to or the closure of the Royal Holloway Classics department. Until 2022, she was a professor at the Department of Classics at King's College London. She also co-founded and is Consultant Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at Oxford University, Chair of the Gilbert Murray Trust, and Judge on the Stephen Spender Prize for poetry translation. Her prizewinning doctoral thesis was awarded at Oxford. In 2012 she was awarded a Humboldt Research Prize to study ancient Greek theatre in the Black Sea, and in 2014 she was elected to the Academy of Europe. She lives in Cambridgeshire.
In Greek mythology, Eucleia or Eukleia was the female personification of glory and good repute.
The Labourers of Herakles is a 1995 play created by English poet and playwright Tony Harrison. It is partially based on remaining fragments of tragedies by ancient Greek dramatist Phrynichos, one of the earliest tragedians. Harrison's play deals with genocide and ethnic cleansing and uses Heracles's filicide as a metaphor for the unspeakable horrors of war and man's inhumanity to man.
Marian Maguire is a lithographer from New Zealand. She is known for juxtaposing landscapes, historical characters, and mythical figures from New Zealand and from ancient Greece, mixing the realism of 19th-century colonial prints with the more stylized designs of Greek black-figure pottery and Māori wood carvings.
Susan Jane Deacy is a classical scholar who has been Professor of Classics at the University of Roehampton since January 2018. She researches the history and literature of the ancient Greek world, with a particular focus on gender and sexuality, ancient Greek mythology and religion, and disability studies. She is also an expert on the teaching of subjects which are potentially sensitive, including sexual violence, domestic violence, and infanticide; she was project leader on the initiative 'Teaching Sensitive Subjects in the Classics Classroom'. She is also series editor of Routledge's Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World, and has been editor of the Bulletin of the Council of University Classical Departments since 2011.
Amy C. Smith is the current Curator of the Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology and Professor of Classical Archaeology at Reading University. She is known for her work on iconography, the history of collections, and digital museology.
Fiona Macintosh is professor of classical reception at the University of Oxford, director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, curator of the Ioannou Centre, and a Fellow of St Hilda's College, Oxford.
Miriam Anna Leonard is Professor of Greek Literature and its Reception at University College, London. She is known in particular for her work on the reception of Greek tragedy in modern intellectual thought.
Rebecca Futo Kennedy is Associate Professor of Classics, Women's and Gender Studies, and Environmental Studies at Denison University, and the Director of the Denison Museum. Her research focuses on the political, social, and cultural history of Classical Athens, Athenian tragedy, ancient immigration, ancient theories of race and ethnicity, and the reception of those theories in modern race science.
Jennifer Baird, is a British archaeologist and academic. She is Professor in Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research focuses on the archaeology of Rome's eastern provinces, particularly the site of Dura-Europos.
Laurence Totelin (FRHistS) is a historian of Greek and Roman science, technology, and medicine. She is professor of ancient history at Cardiff University.
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