This brought, among other things, a wholesale transformation of the annual CA conference, vastly increasing the number of participants, making it infinitely more attractive to students and early-career scholars, and generally ‘intellectualising and democratising’ an event which has become the highlight of the UK Classics calendar (Malcolm Schofield in The Classical Association: The First Century 1903–2003, p.76).
“Richard’s presidential address, ‘The Ancient Greeks and Global Warming’, delivered at the joint CA/CAS conference in Glasgow in April 2009, was a characteristic example of his approach to scholarship: utterly original, deeply thought-provoking and inspiring, personally and politically engaged, and delivered with the absolute clarity and precision that was typical of his style as a lecturer. He will be remembered as one of the most consistently original and intellectually ambitious Classicists of the last 50 years, his reputation established in a stunning set of 1980s articles on the ways in which ancient Greek myth and ritual shaped the culture’s literature and thought and further enhanced by a series of ground-breaking monographs, including Reciprocity and Ritual (1994), Money and the Ancient Greek Mind (2004), Cosmology and the Polis (2012), and The Origins of Philosophy in Ancient Greece and Ancient India (2019).”
~ Prof. Douglas L. Cairns (Chair of Council)