Dr Henry Stead

Senior Lecturer

Researcher profile

Phone

+44 (0)1334 46 2621

Email

has22@st-andrews.ac.uk

Office

S12

Location

Swallowgate

 

Research areas

I am a Classical Reception scholar and Latinist with a special interest in the reception of Greek and Roman culture among the British working classes from the late 18th to the 20th century. I also work on defiant and leftist appropriations of classical culture.

BRAVE NEW CLASSICS

My current research project is called Brave New Classics. It began life in May 2016 as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship hosted by Open University. Until May 2019 it investigated the unlikely but electric convergence of classics and British communism to 1956. The project has since extended its scope and now explores the relationship between world communism and the classics, and aims for the BNC website to become a key platform for international and collaborative research into the subject. The work dovetails with my previous study on working-class engagements with Greek and Roman culture in Britain and Ireland to 1939. 

CLASSICS AND CLASS IN BRITAIN (1789-1939)

I was the Research Associate on the major AHRC-funded research project into working-class receptions of ancient Greek and Roman culture, led by Prof. Edith Hall and hosted by King’s College London (Jan 2013-Dec 2015). Our website can be visited here, and our jointly edited volume, Greek and Roman Classics and the British Struggle for Social Reform (Bloomsbury, 2015), is currently available in all good legal deposit libraries. Additionally, we have a joint authored book (Routledge, 2020) entitled A People’s History of Classics. 

Before working on Classics and Class I was completing my first classical reception project, which grew from my doctoral thesis.

A COCKNEY CATULLUS

At the Open University and University of Oxford, 2008-11 I held the Michael Comber Studentship for Classical Reception. I explored the reception of Catullus in Romantic-era Britain. The book is now published by Oxford University Press as A Cockney Catullus (2015).

Selected publications

• Open access

  A proletarian classics: the relationship between ancient Greek and Roman culture and world communism from 1917

  Stead, H. (ed.), Movrin, D. (ed.) & Olechowska, E. (ed.), 23 Dec 2022, In: Clotho. 4, 2, 364 p.

  Research output: Contribution to journal › Special issue › peer-review

• Fire, fennel and the future of socialism: Tony Harrison’s Prometheus

  Stead, H., 7 Feb 2022, Tony Harrison and the Classics. Byrne, S. (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 202-221 (Classical presences).

  Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

• Open access

  ‘Comrade Doris’: Lessing’s correspondence with the Foreign Commission of the Board of Soviet Writers in the 1950s

  Stead, H., 14 Apr 2021, In: Critical Quarterly. 63, 1, p. 35-47

  Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

• A people's history of classics: class and Greco-Roman antiquity in Britain and Ireland 1689 to 1939

  Hall, E. & Stead, H., 6 Mar 2020, London: Routledge. 642 p.

  Research output: Book/Report › Book

• Approaching Classical Reception through the Frame of Social Class

  Stead, H. & Hall, E., 2020, Framing Classical Reception Studies: Different Perspectives on a Developing field. Brill, p. 83-94 11 p.

  Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

• Open access

  Classics, crisis and the Soviet experiment to 1939

  Stead, H. A. & Paulouskaya, H., 30 Jul 2020, Classicising Crisis: The Modern Age of Revolutions and the Greco-Roman Repertoire. Goff, B. & Simpson, M. (eds.). London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 20 p.

  Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

• Open access

  “Ovid’s Old Age”: Jacek Kaczmarski and the sung poetry of exile

  Borowski, P. & Stead, H., 18 Dec 2020, In: Clotho. 2, 2, p. 5-38 34 p.

  Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

• British Communist Theatre and Aristophanes: The Case of Ewan MacColl and Joan Littlewood

  Stead, H., 2019, Classics and Communism in Theatre: Graeco-Roman Antiquity on the Communist Stage. p. 23-43 20 p.

  Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

• Classics down the mineshaft: a buried history

  Stead, H., 1 Dec 2018, Classics in Extremis: The Edges of Classical Reception. Richardson, E. (ed.). London: Bloomsbury Academic, p. 136-156 21 p. (Bloomsbury Studies in Classical Reception).

  Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

• Kane O’Hara’s Midas: the Irish origins of classical burlesque

  Stead, H., 2018, Epic Performances: From the Middle Ages into the Twenty-first Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press (OUP), p. 461-475 15 p.

  Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

 

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