Tragedy is a genre of drama based on human suffering and, mainly, the terrible or sorrowful events that befall a main character or cast of characters. Traditionally, the intention of tragedy is to invoke an accompanying catharsis, or a "pain [that] awakens pleasure,” for the audience. While many cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, the term tragedy often refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of Western civilization. That tradition has been multiple and discontinuous, yet the term has often been used to invoke a powerful effect of cultural identity and historical continuity—"the Greeks and the Elizabethans, in one cultural form; Hellenes and Christians, in a common activity," as Raymond Williams puts it.
Quentin Robert Duthie Skinner is a British intellectual historian. He is regarded as one of the founders of the Cambridge School of the history of political thought. He has won numerous prizes for his work, including the Wolfson History Prize in 1979 and the Balzan Prize in 2006. Between 1996 and 2008 he was Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge. He is the Emeritus Professor of the Humanities and Co-director of The Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought at Queen Mary University of London.
Oliver Taplin, FBA is a retired British academic and classicist. He was a fellow of Magdalen College and Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Oxford. He holds a DPhil from Oxford University.
Frederick M. Ahl is a professor of classics and comparative literature at Cornell University. He is known for his work in Greek and Roman epic and drama, and the intellectual history of Greece and Rome, as well as for translations of tragedy and Latin epic.
Glen Warren Bowersock is a historian of ancient Greece, Rome and the Near East, and former chairman of Harvard’s classics department.
Paul Anthony Cartledge is a British ancient historian and academic. From 2008 to 2014 he was the A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge. He had previously held a personal chair in Greek History at Cambridge.
Robin Grimsey Osborne, is an English historian of classical antiquity, who is particularly interested in Ancient Greece.
Rush Rehm is professor of drama and classics at Stanford University in California, in the United States. He also works professionally as an actor and director. He has published many works on classical theatre. Rehm is the artistic director of Stanford Repertory Theater (SRT), a professional theater company that presents a dramatic festival based on a major playwright each summer. SRT's 2016 summer festival, Theater Takes a Stand, celebrates the struggle for workers' rights. A political activist, Rehm has been involved in Central American and Cuban solidarity, supporting East Timorese resistance to the Indonesian invasion and occupation, the ongoing struggle for Palestinian rights, and the fight against US militarism. In 2014, he was awarded Stanford's Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award for Outstanding Service to Undergraduate Education.
Patricia Elizabeth Easterling, FBA is an English classical scholar, recognised as a particular expert on the work of Sophocles. She was Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge from 1994 to 2001. She was the 36th person and the first — and, so far, only — woman to hold the post.
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.
The Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) is an interdisciplinary research centre within the University of Cambridge. Founded in 2001, CRASSH came into being as a way to create interdisciplinary dialogue across the University’s many faculties and departments in the arts, social sciences, and humanities, as well as to build bridges with scientific subjects.
Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors or actresses, to present experiences of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music, and dance. It is the oldest form of drama, though live theatre has now been joined by modern recorded forms. Elements of art, such as painted scenery and stagecraft such as lighting are used to enhance the physicality, presence and immediacy of the experience. Places, normally buildings, where performances regularly take place are also called "theatres", as derived from the Ancient Greek θέατρον, itself from θεάομαι.
Shallet Turner FRS LL. D. was a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. As Regius Professor of Modern history he was notorious for treating the position as a sinecure.
Ian Matthew Morris is a British historian and archaeologist who is the Willard Professor of Classics at Stanford University.
John Richard "Jaś" Elsner, is a British art historian and classicist, who is Professor of Late Antique Art in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Oxford, Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Archaeology and Art at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and Visiting Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago. He is mainly known for his work on Roman art, including Late Antiquity and Byzantine art, as well as the historiography of art history, and is a prolific writer on these and other topics. Elsner has been described as "one of the most well-known figures in the field of ancient art history, respected for his notable erudition, extensive range of interests and expertise, his continuing productivity, and above all, for the originality of his mind", and by Shadi Bartsch, a colleague at Chicago, as "the predominant contemporary scholar of the relationship between classical art and ancient subjectivity".
The Faculty of Classics is one of the constituent departments of the University of Cambridge. It teaches the Classical Tripos. The Faculty is divided into five caucuses ; literature, ancient philosophy, ancient history, Classical art and archaeology, linguistics, and interdisciplinary studies.
Simon Charles Robert Swain, FBA, is a classicist and academic. Since 2000, he has been Professor of Classics at the University of Warwick, where he has also been Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Arts and Social Sciences since 2014.
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.
Catherine Mary Conybeare is an academic and philologist and an authority on Augustine of Hippo. She is currently Leslie Clark Professor in the Humanities at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania.
Ruby Blondell is Professor Emerita of Classics and Adjunct Professor Emerita of Gender, Women, & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington; prior to retirement, they were the Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor of Humanities also at the University of Washington. Their research centres on Greek intellectual history, gender studies, and the reception of ancient myth in contemporary culture.
