Newsflash: Upcoming Conference
Next year, on June 16th-18th 2026, we will be convening a major international conference, Philomythia: Aristotle’s Use of Previous Literatures, which will segue into a workshop run by Alessandro, The Languages of Greek Sciences. Alessandro will be issuing his own CfP in due course. We will be issuing the Philomythia CfP soon, but wanted to give you all a heads-up before making it public.
While Plato’s literary models, quotations and allusions have been intensively investigated, enquiry into Aristotle’s immersion in other writers and genres in treatises other than Poetics and Rhetoric has been largely ignored, with some exceptions including Robert Mayhew on Homer.
Rosie is particularly interested in Herodotus and Thucydides; Edith in drama and Homer; Alessandro in the orators and Phil in the Presocratics who composed in verse. We welcome proposals on these authors and genres, of course, but are particularly keen to identify speakers on Hesiod; Lyric, Elegiac and Iambic poetry; other historiographers including Xenophon; Aesop; Plato; and probably Hippocrates.
The papers delivered at the conference will be adapted and supplemented to form the basis of a major edited collection, the first ever on Aristotle as a figure in literary history.
Joint Activities 2024-2025
Our major task this year has been close reading together of the Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics, Politics, as well as the Ode to Hermias, Magna Moralia, Virtues and Vices and Economics transmitted in the Aristotelian corpus.
Events
Phil, Alessandro and Edith contributed to a workshop The Afterlife of Aristotle’s Organon convened by Mara Nicosia, British Academy Newton International Fellow at Durham University, on 24th January.
There were many overlaps between the project’s work and the papers delivered at the conference held under the rubric of the sister research project Aristotle beyond the Academy on 26th-27th March; Alessandro Vatri and our Advisory Board member Sophia Connell are both contributing chapters to the ensuing publication Summoning Aristotle: Explorations in his Public Reception, now contracted to Liverpool University Press.
Phil and Edith both contributed to a workshop, Oneirata: Workshop on Sleep, Dreams, and Divination in Aristotle and his Predecessors,organised on 22nd-24th May by Phil’s PhD students Maria Cristina Mennuti and Marco Picciafuochi and supported by our project.
The major event this year was our conference Style and Substance: Lexis and its Application in Aristotelian Philosophy (11th-13th June), convened by Rosie and Phil.
Advisory Board member Tim Whitmarsh gave a fascinating paper at Durham on Thursday 19th June, ‘Translation as imperialism: Late Greek Poetics and the Hebrew Bible.’
Edith, Rosie and Alessandro all disseminated results of the project’s investigations at a conference on war and emotions, Passages from Ancient to Medieval and Early Modern Societies, held in Tampere, Finland 13th–15th August, 2025.
