CA at Nottingham!

From Sunday afternoon to Wednesday lunch-time, the Department of Classics at Nottingham has played host to the annual conference of the Classical Association.

The CA is the UK-wide subject association for Classics of every flavour, and its annual conference is the biggest gathering of Classicists in the country, bringing together academics, graduate (and undergraduate) students, school-teachers and others from Britain and from all over the world.

This year as always brought a wide variety of papers covering a huge range of the multi-faceted world that is classical scholarship, from archaeology and art history to literature and from history to philosophy: it would be invidious to select out particular panels for mention here, with so much to choose from… Two inspiring plenary sessions gave a thrilling sense of Classics as a discipline on the move, first with Alex Purves of the University of California at Los Angeles and Nottingham’s own Katharina Lorenz on “The Spatial Turn: Space and Narrative in Ancient Art and Literature” and then with Penelope Davies (University of Texas) and Kostas Vlassopoulos (Nottingham) on “The Ancient City”. On Tuesday evening, a witty and fascinating presidential address by CA president Martha Kearney was followed by the conference dinner at Colwick Hall.

Many thanks to the Classical Association for bringing this wonderful conference here; and many thanks to our own Helen Lovatt for her enormous amount of work as local organiser, and to a large local team including staff, PGs and UGs (above all, to our wonderful green-t-shirt-wearing student helpers!).