Professor Edith Hall

Professor of Classics and Drama

Ancient drama and its performance; ancient music, song and dance; gender, ethnicity, and social class in the theatre; the history of performances of ancient plays and epic poetry in theatre, opera and film – there are the main areas in which my research has concentrated. My own work has always been closely allied with the research of the many doctoral candidates I have supervised while holding posts in Classics at the universities of Cambridge, Reading, Oxford and Durham, before joining RHUL as Professor jointly in Drama and in Classics in 2006. While at Oxford I co-founded, with Oliver Taplin, the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (see http://www.apgrd.ox.ac.uk/), of which I remain Co-Director, and with which RHUL postgraduate drama students organise an annual symposium.

I have been involved as consultant in several professional productions of ancient drama by the RSC, the ENO, the National Theatre, Northern Broadsides, the Abbey Theatre, Dublin and Live Theatre in Newcastle. I regularly review productions of ancient drama for BBC Radio and the Times Literary Supplement and have been involved in several TV documentaries on ancient Greece and its theatres. I am currently completing a study of Aristophanes in performance, a collection of essays on Roman pantomime, an Introduction to Greek tragedy for OUP, and a cultural history of the Homeric Odyssey. I enthusiastically welcome enquiries from prospective research students.

Forthcoming event:

"Greece, Rome, and Colonial India", Reading University, 29 June 2007 (more details...)

Books

• Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (OUP 1989).
• Sophocles' Antigone, Oedipus the King and Electra (edited with Introduction and Notes, OUP World's Classics 1994).
• Aeschylus' Persians: edited with Translation, Introduction and Commentary (Aris & Phillips 1996).
• Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre 1660-1914 (co-authored with Dr Fiona Macintosh, OUP 2005).
• The Theatrical Cast of Athens: Interactions between Ancient Greek Drama & Society (OUP 2006).

Edited Volumes

• Medea in Performance 1500-2000 (with Fiona Macintosh and Oliver Taplin, Legenda 2000)
• Greek & Roman Actors: Aspects of an Ancient Profession (with Pat Easterling, CUP 2002)
• Dionysus since 69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium (with Fiona Macintosh and Amanda Wrigley, OUP 2004)
• Agamemnon in Performance 458 BC to 2005 AD (with Fiona Macintosh, Pantelis Michelakis, and Oliver Taplin, OUP 2005).
• Cultural Responses to the Persian Wars: Antiquity to the Third Millennium (with Emma Bridges and Peter Rhodes, OUP 2006)

Selected Articles

• 'Political and cosmic turbulence in Euripides' Orestes', in A. Sommerstein et al. (eds.), Tragedy, Comedy and the Polis, 263-85 (Bari 1993)
• 'Is there a polis in Aristotle's Poetics?', in M.S. Silk (ed.), Tragedy and the Tragic: Greek Theatre and Beyond, 294-309 (Oxford 1996).
• 'The sociology of Athenian tragedy', in Pat Easterling (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, 93-126 (Cambridge 1997).
• 'Literature and performance', in Paul Cartledge (ed.), The Cambridge Illustrated History of Ancient Greece, 219-49 (Cambridge 1997).
• 'Tony Harrison's Prometheus: a view from the Left'Arion 10 (2002), 129-40
• 'Towards a theory of performance reception'Arion 12 (2004), 51-89
• 'Iphigenia and her mother at Aulis: a study in the revival of a Euripidean Classic', in S. Wilmer and J. Dillon (eds.), Rebel Women: Staging Ancient Greek Drama Today, 3-41 (Methuen 2005).

Contact Details

Direct line: 01784 414125
E-mail: edith.hall@rhul.ac.uk