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 with a special interest in the reception of ancient Greek and Roman culture among the British working classes and the international left.

I supervise postgraduate students exploring the modern reception of antiquity (late 18th c to present day) and welcome expressions of interest to work with me on historically informed PhD projects. I am also open to co-supervisions of creative PhD projects engaging with classical antiquity. 

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).

PhD supervision

• Christopher Anaforian
• Anna Coopey

Selected publications

• Class in classics

  Canevaro, L. G., Canevaro, M., Mazzinghi Gori, B., Stead, H. & Williams Reed, E. B., 26 Feb 2024, University of Edinburgh. 80 p.

  Research output: Book/Report › Commissioned report

• Sandow the modern Hercules: or the twelve labours of the class-conscious historian of British classics

  Stead, H., 22 Aug 2024, Hercules performed: the hero on stage from the Enlightenment to the early twenty-first century. Stafford, E. (ed.). Leiden: Brill, p. 19-44 26 p. (Metaforms - studies in the reception of classical antiquity; vol. 25).

  Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter (peer-reviewed) › peer-review

• From Argyll with love: Naomi Mitchison and the Soviet Union

  Stead, H., 1 Mar 2023, Naomi Mitchison: a writer in time. Purdon, J. (ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, p. 89-107 19 p.

  Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter (peer-reviewed) › peer-review

• Open access

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

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

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

• Open access

  A proletarian classics?

  Stead, H., 23 Dec 2022, In: Clotho. 4, 2, p. 9-25 17 p.

  Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › 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 20 p. (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 Taylor & Francis Group. 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

 

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