Who’s Afraid of a Queer Achilles?

Queer theory offers original perspectives from which to revise theoretical framings of Classics as a discipline. In this post, LUCAS postdoc in Latin literature Francesco Busti reflects on the urgency of queering Classics amid the current surge in nationalist and anti-LGBTQIA+ stances across Europe

Francesco Busti • June 25, 2024

Ships and Shipwrecks: What an Ancient Latin Poem Can Tell Us about Meloni’s Immigration Policies

A Latin poem by one of Catullus’ fellow poets and the immigration policies adopted by Italy’s far-right-led government share a similar perspective on non-European people. In this blog post, Francesco Busti reflects on Europe’s millennia-old exploitative attitudes towards the rest of the world.

Francesco Busti • March 25, 2024

Extinction rebellion, the struggle for law, and the role of the arts – or scholars

In this entry, Professor of Literature, Culture and Law, Frans Willem Korsten reflects upon the struggle for law and the role of the arts in the midst of the current Extinction Rebellion protest at the A12 motorway in The Hague, September 2023.

Frans Willem Korsten • September 15, 2023

It’s all fun and games until Diogenes shows up: wit, Homeric quotations, and death-images in the anecdotes regarding our most favourite Cynic

Can Homeric parody be a means of criticizing society? In this blog post Giorgia Garuti, PhD candidate at the University of Pisa and visiting researcher at LUCAS until last May, explores the function of Homeric quotations in two anecdotes regarding Diogenes of Sinope.

Giorgia Garuti • June 19, 2023

The History of VR – An Ancient Pursuit

When did humanity first begin to create the sensation of being in VR? Miguel Mira reflects on the history of the medium, considering Oliver Grau’s theory on the immersive qualities of the Villa dei Misteri all the way to Morton Heilig’s Sensorama machine.

Miguel Mira • June 09, 2023

“I’ve got a blank space, baby”: Untangling Organizational Strategies in Early Modern Manuscript Compilations

How do you organize the texts you copy into blank notebooks? In this blog, Holly Riach reflects on the manuscripts she consulted at the Huntington Library, California, and explores what a blank page can tell us about the production and organization of textual collections in early modern England.

Holly Riach • May 25, 2023

Accius in Leiden

How did the work done, sometimes in extraordinary circumstances, by a few seventeenth-century Dutch scholars connected with Leiden University contribute to shaping the way in which we experience the fragments of the Roman poet Accius today? That is a story I propose to investigate in this blog post.

Basil L. P. Nelis • May 11, 2023

Mapping Gendered Agency in Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929)

Digital Humanities gives us tools to analyze stories. But what kind of insights do we really gain from them? In this blog, Lyna Meyrer will use the experimental modernist novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) to show what digital cartography reveals about this complex story of human relationships.

Lyna Meyrer • April 13, 2023

How to be troubled by a bridge over water

When humans alter the natural landscape, this often elicits strong human responses. In this blog, Kees Geluk discusses an ancient Greek poem on a harbour mole and compares it to modern environmental attitudes.

Kees Geluk • March 30, 2023

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