 | |
| Established | 1831 |
|---|---|
Parent institution | Faculty of Arts and Humanities, King's College London |
| Head of Department | Will Wootton |
| Location | |
| Website | Department of Classics |
The Department of Classics is an academic division in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at King's College London. It is one of the oldest and most distinguished university departments specialising in the study of classical antiquity in the United Kingdom. [1] [2] [3]
King's College was established in 1829 under the patronage of George IV. [4] Its royal charter outlined its mission as "the general education of youth in which the various branches of Literature and Science are intended to be taught, and also the doctrines and duties of Christianity [...] inculcated by the United Church of England and Ireland." [5] The College counted among its founders and benefactors the Duke of Wellington, who was Prime Minister at the time, and a number of other eminent politicians and theologians of the British Establishment. [6] [7] [8]
The College included a Chair of Classical Literature as part of its foundational setup. Classical subjects, along with Law, Literature and Theology, were therefore taught at King's from the day it first formally opened its doors in 1831. The inaugural Professor of Classical Literature was the English scholar Joseph Anstice, whose introductory lecture on the enduring significance of classical education marked the beginning of what is today the Classics Department. [9] [10]
The Tale of Troy is the title given to a series of famous performances in London between 1883 and 1887.
George Charles Winter Warr, Professor of Classical Literature from 1879 to 1901, developed an adaptation of the Iliad and the Odyssey entitled The Tale of Troy. Four performances were scheduled in late May and early June 1883, two in English and two in the original Greek. The goal was to raise sufficient funds to secure premises in Kensington for the newly founded King's College Lectures for Ladies. [11] [12] [13] [14] [15]
Although originally planned on a modest scale, the end product was a lavish spectacle staged in the South Kensington mansion of Sir Charles and Lady Freake. The plays were attended by prominent figures in scholarship, art, music, theatre and high society. The production was revived in May 1886, this time to raise funds for the extension of university teaching in London. This expanded version was moved to Prince's Hall in Piccadilly and included the story of Orestes, adapted from Aeschylus's Oresteian Trilogy. The Prince and Princess of Wales were also in attendance. The complete final version was published in 1887 under the title Echoes of Hellas with illustrations by Walter Crane. [11] [13] [14] [16]
The Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature was established at King's College in 1918 to serve as the focal point in Britain for Hellenic studies beyond antiquity. [17] It was championed by the likes of the Anglo-Hellenic League and by Eleftherios Venizelos, then Prime Minister of the Hellenic Parliament and a close friend of King's College Principal Ronald Montagu Burrows. [18] [19] Burrows was himself a famous classical scholar and philhellene. [20]
The Koraes Chair is named in honour of Adamantios Koraes, the founding father of the modern Greek nation state. Its inauguration also marked the beginning of the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, which has itself since been merged into the Department of Classics. [21] [22] [23]
The Koraes Chair was recently held by Roderick Beaton for a thirty-year period from 1988 to 2018. It is currently held by the Belgian-American scholar Gonda Van Steen. [24]
The Parthenon sculptures were hidden directly underneath the department in the tunnels of the now-disused Strand station during the Second World War. They were only brought back to the British Museum in nearby Bloomsbury in 1948, where they have remained since. [25] [26] [27]
The work of the original Chair of Classical Literature was split into two separate Chairs of Greek and Latin during this period. [28]
The Centre for Hellenic Studies (CHS) was established at the Department in 1989 to promote research and scholarship of Hellenic history, culture and language. On Greek Independence Day in 2010, plans were announced for the CHS to include teaching alongside its research activities. Under these new arrangements the CHS also came to incorporate the Department of Byzantine & Modern Greek Studies. [29]
A public dispute arose in 2010 over plans to axe the last Chair of Paleography in the United Kingdom and wider English speaking world. [30] Principal Rick Trainor announced the controversial plans as part of a College restructuring project. [31] The issue was debated as an Early Day Motion in Parliament. [32]
The British parliamentarian Boris Johnson visited the College in 2011 as Mayor of London to deliver a speech on the importance of classical education. [33] [34]
In 2014, the Centre for Hellenic Studies merged its teaching and research activities with the Department of Classics. The CHS continues to be a prominent research centre of its own in the Arts & Humanities Research Institute (AHRI). [35] [36]
The Department of Classics is located on the historic Strand. It occupies a set of buildings at the corner of Surrey Street which are linked internally through a series of corridors and staircases. 169 Strand was purpose-built for College use in 1928 above the disused Strand station and features the old King's coat of arms on its facade. The Royal Strand Theatre stood on this site from 1832 until its demolition in 1905. 170 Strand contains offices, teaching rooms and the department common room with a balcony overlooking the street. 171 Strand is a corner house with retail operating on ground floor level. Academic offices extend along 39 to 41 Surrey Street. [27] [37]
The King's College London Rifle & Pistol Club (KCLRPC) has occupied the Strand underground tunnels beneath the department as their shooting range since the 1920s. [38]
The vaults at the rear of the Surrey Street buildings house the old Roman Baths on Strand Lane. [39] [40]
In the most recent Research Excellence Framework (2014), the department ranked 7th out of 22 in the United Kingdom for research. [41] The Complete University Guide ranked Classics at King's as 11th nationally in 2019, [42] and in its 2022 Guide, it ranked Classics as 16th [43] and history (inclusive of ancient history) at 10th. [44] In 2018, the QS World University Rankings ranked the department at 5th nationally and 21st globally. [45] [46] In the Guardian University Guide, Classics & ancient history at King's was rated 22nd out of 26 in 2020, [47] rising to 15th out of 25 in 2021. [48]
The King's Greek Play has been an annual tradition since 1953. It is the only dramatic production in the United Kingdom to be performed every year in the original ancient Greek language. The production has also previously toured America and Canada. The Department of Classics houses a physical archive of related materials and recordings. [49] [50] [51]
Every year on the first Thursday of February, the department hosts its annual Runciman Lecture named in honour of Sir Steven Runciman. The lectures were established in the early 1990s and funded in perpetuity by the Czech count and artist Nicholas Egon. The event is traditionally preceded by an Orthodox Vespers in the College Chapel on the Strand. [52] [53] [54]
The Jamie Rumble Memorial Fund was established in 2013 through a major donation from a former student. The Rumble Fund sponsors field trips where students have the opportunity to engage directly with the classical lands in their studies. Travel destinations have so far included Athens and Rome, with future trips to sites in Cyprus, Sicily, North Africa and Turkey proposed. The Rumble Fund also subsidises an annual guest lecture in classical art. [55] [56]
The Department of Classics also supports the Iris Project, an educational charity designed to promote study of the classical world to state schools in the United Kingdom. Students in the department have the opportunity to teach Latin to disadvantaged children. [57] [58] [59]
Student life in the department is administered by the Classics Society (formerly the Classical Society). The Society publishes a journal titled the New Satyrica. A new undergraduate research journal, Kerberos, was also launched in 2018. There is a common room at 170 Strand which previously housed the departmental library. [49] [60] [51] [61]
The Classics Society hosts an annual Winter Ball. [62]
There are a number of notable individuals associated with the Classics Department at King's.
Greek literature dates back from the ancient Greek literature, beginning in 800 BC, to the modern Greek literature of today.
Cyril Alexander Mango was a British scholar of the history, art, and architecture of the Byzantine Empire. He is celebrated as one of the leading Byzantinists of the 20th century.
Dame Averil Millicent Cameron, often cited as A. M. Cameron, is a British historian. She writes on Late Antiquity, Classics, and Byzantine Studies. She was Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine History at the University of Oxford, and the Warden of Keble College, Oxford, between 1994 and 2010.
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.
The Anglo-Hellenic League was founded in the aftermath of the 1912–13 Balkan Wars in order to counter anti-Greek propaganda in the United Kingdom. Dedicated to promoting Anglo-Greek understanding and friendship, the League has a long history of charitable and cultural work. After the First World War, through John Gennadius, a co-founder and Honorary President, the League took a leading role in establishing the Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King's College London. During the Second World War the League raised funds for the starving Greek population and for the Greek Navy and the Merchant Marine. In the immediate post-war years the League gave assistance to a children's home, a hospital in Athens and to war-ravaged villages in remote parts of Greece and gave similar help to the southern Ionian Islands after the 1953 Ionian earthquake. In 1979/80 the League raised over £80,000 towards the 'Save the Acropolis' Appeal.
Judith Herrin is an English archaeologist, byzantinist, and historian of Late Antiquity. She was a Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies and Constantine Leventis Senior Research Fellow at King's College London.
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.
Hellenic studies is an interdisciplinary scholarly field that focuses on the language, literature, history and politics of post-classical Greece. In university, a wide range of courses expose students to viewpoints that help them understand the historical and political experiences of Byzantine, Ottoman and modern Greece; the ways in which Greece has borne its several pasts and translated them into the modern era; and the era's distinguished literary and artistic traditions.
Donald MacGillivray Nicol, was an English Byzantinist.
The King's College London Faculty of Arts & Humanities is one of the nine academic Faculties of Study of King's College London. It is situated on the Strand in the heart of central London, in the vicinity of many renowned cultural institutions with which the Faculty has close links including the British Museum, Shakespeare's Globe, the National Portrait Gallery and the British Library. In the 2024 Times Higher Education World University Rankings by subject, King's Arts & Humanities ranked in the top twenty worldwide.
Charlotte Roueché is a British academic who specialises in the analysis of texts, inscribed or in manuscripts, from the Roman, Late Antique, and Byzantine periods. She is particularly interested in those from the Asia Minor cities of ancient Ephesos and Aphrodisias. She is also interested in the interface between digital humanities and classical and Byzantine studies. She is Professor Emerita of Digital Hellenic Studies at King's College London, and Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London.
The Department of Philosophy is an academic division in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at King's College London. It is one of the largest and most distinguished centres for the study of philosophy in the United Kingdom.
Helena Stefanovich Schilizzi, was a wealthy Greek-British philanthropist, and second wife of the Greek statesman Eleftherios Venizelos.
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.
Gonda Aline Hector Van Steen is a Belgian-American classical scholar and linguist, who specialises in ancient and modern Greek language and literature. Since 2018, she has been Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature, the first woman to hold this position, and Director of the Centre for Hellenic Studies at King's College London. She previously held the Cassas Chair in Greek Studies at the University of Florida, and taught at the University of Arizona and at Cornell University. She has also served as the President of the Modern Greek Studies Association (2012–2014).
The Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature is a chair in the Classics Department at King's College London. It was established in 1918 to serve as a focal point in the United Kingdom and beyond for the study of Greek history and culture from the end of antiquity to the present day.
Ruth Iouliani (Juliana) Macrides was a UK-based historian of the Byzantine Empire. At the time of her death, she was Reader in Byzantine Studies at the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham. She was an expert in Byzantine history, culture and politics, particularly of the mid-later Byzantine period, and on the reception of Byzantium in Britain and Greece.
Roderick Macleod Beaton, FBA, FKC is a retired academic. He was Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King's College London from 1988 to 2018.
Rosa Andújar, FHEA, is a Dominican-American classicist and senior lecturer at King's College London. She is an expert in ancient Greek tragedy, especially the tragic chorus, and Hellenic classicisms in Latin America.
