This subfield focuses on the ways in which ancient Greek and Roman culture has been received, adapted, and reinterpreted in later periods, from the Renaissance to contemporary popular culture.
Classical Antiquity: The period of the ancient Mediterranean world, which includes ancient Greece and Rome. It covers from the 8th century BCE to the 5th century CE.
Reception Theory: The study of how texts are received and interpreted by different audiences and cultures. It's an interdisciplinary approach that looks at the ways that works are interpreted and how those interpretations change over time.
Cultural Studies: An interdisciplinary field that studies culture and its manifestations, including literature, art, music, media, and so on. It examines cultural practices, power relations, and meanings.
Literary Theory: The study of literature, its structure, meaning, and interpretation. It includes various approaches like psychoanalytic, feminist, postcolonial, and deconstructionist.
Postcolonial Studies: The study of cultural production in societies that were or are colonized. It examines the intersections of race, gender, class, and nationality in the context of colonial and postcolonial power relations.
Feminist Theory: The study of gender, power and the ways that gender influences culture, politics and social relations.
Mythology: The study of myths, traditional stories, and legends, which carry symbolic meanings and significance for different cultures and societies.
Art History: The study of art, its history, and meaning. It examines artistic production, style, and cultural context.
Film Studies: The study of film as an art form and cultural product. It analyzes films in terms of form, content, cultural context, and social impact.
Philosophy: The study of fundamental questions about existence, meaning, knowledge, and values. It includes various schools of thought like Platonism and Stoicism, Epicureanism and Skepticism.
Religion and Theology: The study of religions, their beliefs, practices, and role in society. It includes the study of classical religion such as Greek and Roman religion.
Reception and Classics: The study of how classical texts and ideas have been received and appropriated in subsequent periods of history. It includes the way in which Greco-Roman mythology and iconography have been repurposed in advertising, literature, film, and comics.
Translation Studies: The study of translation as a practice and cultural exchange. It examines the ways that translations differ ideologically, and how cultures may shape language use and meaning.
Popular Culture: The study of the mass-produced culture and its role in society, such as television, music, comics, and fashion.
Comparative Literature: The study of literature from different linguistic and cultural traditions. It examines the similarities and differences between texts and authors from different cultures.
Digital Humanities: The use of digital tools and methods to study culture and literature. It includes computational analysis and modeling of textual data, as well as creating digital archives and databases.