This conference explores Classical and Early Modern literary forms that draw connections between, and are concerned with the dynamics of, time and power. It constitutes part of a larger research project exploring the politics and aesthetics of time in ancient and early modern writing. The conference will focus mainly on Latin and Early Modern Latin texts, and will explore the following key topics:

– aspects of time in didactic, antiquarian, epistemological and scientific literatures, and the ways in which these texts interact with power discourse;

– changes in the reckoning, recording, organising, or understanding of time, and their embodiment in literary and/or other representational forms;

– grand narratives of time and their ideological uses (e.g. the Golden Age, apocalypse, ‘progress’, decline, etc.);

– the ‘tense’ of certain classical literary genres (e.g. the lyric present; the general impulse towards the past in pastoral poetry; etc.) and their early modern reception;

– literary forms that explore how individual/collective experiences of time are mediated by class, race, and gender;

– literary forms that encode, or proleptically address, modern understandings of the modes of time, the consciousness of time, the unreality of time, etc.

Confirmed speakers: Ovanes Akopyan (University of Innsbruck, Austria), Susannah Ashton (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland), Rebecca Batty (University of Nottingham, UK), Siobhan Chomse (Royal Holloway, UK), Elena Dahlberg (Uppsala University, Sweden), Helen Dixon (University College Dublin, Ireland), Catharine Edwards (Birkbeck, University of London, UK), Tom Geue (University of St Andrews, UK), Philip Hardie (University of Cambridge, UK), Stephen Harrison (University of Oxford, UK), Duncan Kennedy (University of Bristol, UK), Ahuvia Khane (Royal Holloway, UK), Andrew Laird (Brown University, US), Marco Sgarbi (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy), Caroline Stark (Howard University, US), Martin Stöckinger (University of Cologne, Germany), Anke Walter (University of Newcastle, UK), Bobby Xinyue (University of Warwick, UK).

Format: Each speaker will be allocated 30 minutes for their presentation, followed by 10 minutes of discussion.