Call for Papers: Ecocritical Approaches to Ancient Performance Culture
University of Durham
22nd-24th April 2026
Proposals are invited for papers to be delivered at a hybrid conference, convened at the University of Durham by Emma Bentley and Edith Hall, which will address the relationship between ancient Greek and Roman dramatic/mimetic performances and the natural world, including their reception. Ancient performance culture (c.550 BCE-500 CE), under the aegis of the arboreal/vegetal/viticultural/mountain god Dionysus, encompassed tragedy, comedy, satyr play, mime, operatic/balletic pantomime and aquatic/hunting spectacles; these enacted, in venues requiring vast quantities of timber and stone, myths involving creation, plague, flood, fire and marine, tree, metallurgical and agricultural divinities. Questions to be addressed may include: How can evidence (textual/artistic/archaeological) for the rich performance culture of the ancient Greek/Roman worlds (North Africa to Ukraine, Portugal/England to Afghanistan) be read to unmask its producers/consumers’ unease with the relationship between humans and their environment? How can we use dramatic texts and enactments to unravel the ambivalent ancient view of humans’ conflicted relations with nature via (mis)representation/ erasure? Can we refine an ecocritical method that accommodates ‘traditional’ philological/archaeological analysis but advances beyond the (often woolly) antihumanism of New Materialism, the frequently anthropocentric environmental insensitivity of traditional literary Marxism and the nebulous psychological anti-materialism entailed by the Jungian concept of the ‘ecological consciousness’? How best can we test the hypothesis that anthropogenic environmental damage has subsequently been legitimised by receptions of the celebration of the exploitation of nature in the canonical performance texts of antiquity? Can we leverage the creative arts in new receptions of ancient literature to raise awareness of the environmental crisis?
Confirmed speakers include Alicia Stallings, Arnaud Zucker, Alison Sharrock, Joel Christensen, Niklas Bettermann, Jason König, Christopher Schliephake, Magdalena Zira, Andrew Fox, Bill Freeman and Michael Loy. Submissions from Early Career Researchers are particularly welcome. Please send an abstract of around 300 words to emma.bentley@durham.ac.uk by 1st November 2025.