Phiroze Vasunia
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 116410 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Phiroze Vasunia |
| NOMBRES | Phiroze |
| APELLIDO | Vasunia |
| FIRMA | VASUNIA P |
| AFILIACIONES | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
| VERIFICADO | No |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 88 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 51 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 17 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 71 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2002 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 3 |
The Cambridge Companion to Classics and Race
Race as a concept has had a fraught role in the history of Classics, woven into its formation as an academic discipline. While the texts and artefacts of the ancient Mediterranean world provide complex understandings of what race might mean and how it might operate, they have also provided fodder for modern racial ideologies. This Companion offers a wide-ranging and groundbreaking overview of 'race' and 'racism' in ancient Mediterranean cultures …
Reading Greek Tragedy with Judith Butler
Considering Butler’s “tragic trilogy”—a set of interventions on Sophocles’ Antigone, Euripides’ Bacchae, and Aeschylus’s Eumenides—this book seeks to understand not just how Butler uses and interprets Greek tragedy, but also how tragedy shapes Butler’s thinking, even when their gaze is directed elsewhere. Through close readings of these tragedies, this book brings to light the tragic quality of Butler’s writing. It shows how Butler’s mode of read…
The Oxford Handbook of the Literatures of the Roman Empire
This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title w…
Gandhi and Socrates
Gandhi composed his ‘translation’ of Plato's Apology while he was in South Africa. Gandhi was responding to political restrictions against the Indian community and was also influenced by John Ruskin's Unto This Last. Interestingly, the translation was banned by the British authorities in India. This article explores the background to Gandhi's translation and examines the role of Plato's work in the development of his idea of satyagraha
The Classics and Colonial India
Greeks and Romans, Indians and Britons, all come together in the exploration of a fascinating and under-explored phenomenon. Written by a leading authority in the subject, this book provides a lively and detailed discussion of the relationship between classical antiquity and the British colonial presence in India. It examines some of the great figures of the colonial period such as Gandhi and Nehru and Macaulay and Gladstone; it makes accessible …
Homer and Virgil
Homer is frequently translated in colonial India, but Virgil scarcely. Yet, Virgil is translated, adapted, and analysed in Britain. Why do Indian authors and intellectuals turn to Homer so regularly, and why do the British race to Virgil, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century? The ‘Indian’ Homer and the ‘British’ Virgil are complementary approaches to the epic tradition and offer different perspectives on empire. Among the figur…
Dreams of Alexander
Alexander the Great is the subject of two chapters in the book. In this first chapter, the author examines mainly European responses to Alexander from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Among the influential writers discussed are the historians J. G. Droysen and George Grote. But it was not only historians who reflected on Alexander, for geographers such as James Rennell and other British administrators also tried to determine the d…
Competitionwallahs
Sikandar and the History of India
Classics and Colonial India
Offering a unique cross-cultural study, this text provides a detailed account of the relationship between classical antiquity and the British colonial presence in India. Vasunia shows how classical culture pervaded the minds of the British colonizers and highlights the many Indian receptions of Greco-Roman antiquity
Between East and West
Herodotus' History opens with a remarkable proem where he sets forth his programme and offers competing narratives about the causes of war between the Greeks and barbarians. This article examines the proem and looks in particular at the stories about the abductions of Io, Europa, Medea, and Helen. Rather than see the proem as a light-hearted or parodic rejection of alternate histories, this article argues that Herodotus uses the proem to raise ur…
The Comparative Study of Empires
On the basis of a random sample of English-language internet websites about empires, we can now formulate the first law of comparative imperialisms as follows: as an online discussion of empire grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving the Roman Empire approaches 1. (This is a variant of the general law that states that ‘as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1’.) T…
Alexander Sikandar
Envoi
Readers of the second or third editions of the History of classical scholarship by John Edwin Sandys (1844–1922) may recall the apology offered by the author for the book's size. ‘I confess that the work has grown under my hands to a far larger bulk than I had ever contemplated; but, when I reflect that a German “History of Classical Philology”, which does not go beyond the fourth century of our era, fills as many as 1900 large octavo pages, I am…
Classics and National Cultures
Numerous nations have in one way or another engaged with the cultures of classical Greece and Rome. What impact does the classical past have on ideas of the nation, nationhood, nationality, and what effect does the national space have on classical culture? How has classical culture been imagined in various national traditions, what importance has it had within them, and for whom? This collection of essays by an international team of experts tackl…
Postcolonialism
This article discusses the ‘dialogue’ between postcolonial theory and Hellenistic studies. It highlights this by exploring the act of will and self-identification by which Greece is appropriated to a particular culture, made its history, and put to its service. One important point to which the discussion draws attention is the potentially universal significance that this gives Hellenic studies: just because the appropriation of ancient Greece is …
Music
One area where it is particularly difficult to bridge the gap between text and performance is ancient music. This article notes that people today know very little about how ancient music sounded. It is much easier to relate ancient theories of music to other intellectual endeavours, such as the study of physics, mathematics, or ethics, than to investigate its connections with the work of practicing musicians. There is a paradox here, because anci…
Gender Studies
This article examines the meaning given within different social structures to human individuals, whose relationship even with their own bodies is culturally determined. While ‘gender’ is widely understood to be a hermeneutic tool used in feminist research, its relationship to other feminist approaches is not altogether clear. Gender studies as a field is a relatively recent spin-off from ‘women in antiquity’. Investigation of ancient women, the r…
The Greek Heritage in Islam
This article discusses the attempts of Muslim intellectuals to forge a kind of synthesis between Greek philosophy and Islamic thought, attempts that have parallels in the Christian and Judaic traditions. Classical Muslim culture remained a vibrant and pluralistic phenomenon that often conceived of Greek thought and learning as an indigenous tradition, and as a legitimate precursor to Islamic scholarship.
Games and Festivals
The festivals of the Greek world demonstrate the power of Hellenism as a unifying ideal, together with the vitality and variety of local Hellenic practice. There is a vast array of complementary views of Greek festivals, which between them can help people to reconstruct the perspectives of spectator and competitor, citizen and foreign visitor, emperor and benefactor, cultural centres and cultural margins. That highly varied body of material makes…
The Novel
The novel flourished at a time when Greek identity was above all a matter of cultural affiliation. This article argues that the characters in the novels are fundamentally concerned with issues of gender, ethnicity, culture, and identity – and that their readers must have been too. However, the relationship between the world depicted in the novels and that in which they were written and read remains difficult to characterize: it is remarkable, for…
Biography
This article points out that the genre of biography was also fundamentally concerned with Hellenic identity. As the discussion holds, ancient biographies do not just describe individuals, they tackle a range of issues, chief among which is that crucial question, what it might mean to be Greek. Biography is about individuals. That is what makes it interesting; it is also what leaves it vulnerable to critics who look for something more, for the big…
Historiography
In discussing ancient historiography, this article makes something of the opposite claim: Thucydides – for example – wrote ‘a possession for all time’, but was also a man of his age. The ‘linguistic’ and the ‘cultural’ turn in the study of historiography help situate his work in a broader fifth-century context and acknowledge its strangeness. Among other things, new approaches enable people to rediscover the connections between rhetoric and histo…
Religion
Religion as a subject of research is a product of modern times. With monotheistic religions such as Christianity, it is thought of as an autonomous and self-referential system with a large degree of inner coherence and a binding theology. The Greeks, however, had no word for religion as an abstract category. Religion did not exist outside the contexts in which it was lived. Greek religion lacks the defining features of most modern religions. Clas…
Low Philosophy
Philosophy in an Aristotelian vein speaks a language almost of its own making, with unusual words such as substance, accident, matter, form, actuality, potentiality, entelechy, and the like. The ideal here seems to be that philosophy speaks directly to the mortal devotee, who loses himself in that higher music. And yet there are other dimensions to ancient thinkers, even the systematic ones, which sit uneasily with such a high philosophy. This ar…
Classics and National Cultures
Numerous nations have in one way or another engaged with the cultures of classical Greece and Rome. What impact does the classical past have on ideas of the nation, nationhood, nationality, and what effect does the national space have on classical culture? How has classical culture been imagined in various national traditions, what importance has it had within them, and for whom? This collection of essays by an international team of experts tackl…
The Oxford Handbook of Hellenic Studies
The Oxford Handbook of Hellenic Studies is a unique collection of some seventy articles, which together explore the ways in which ancient Greece has been, is, and might be studied. It is intended to inform its readers, but also, importantly, to inspire them, and to enable them to pursue their own research by introducing the primary resources and exploring the latest agenda for their study. The emphasis is on the breadth and potential of Hellenic …
Hellenism and Empire
Between East and West
Herodotus' History opens with a remarkable proem where he sets forth his programme and offers competing narratives about the causes of war between the Greeks and barbarians. This article examines the proem and looks in particular at the stories about the abductions of Io, Europa, Medea, and Helen. Rather than see the proem as a light-hearted or parodic rejection of alternate histories, this article argues that Herodotus uses the proem to raise ur…
Gandhi and Socrates
Gandhi composed his ‘translation’ of Plato's Apology while he was in South Africa. Gandhi was responding to political restrictions against the Indian community and was also influenced by John Ruskin's Unto This Last. Interestingly, the translation was banned by the British authorities in India. This article explores the background to Gandhi's translation and examines the role of Plato's work in the development of his idea of satyagraha
The Comparative Study of Empires
On the basis of a random sample of English-language internet websites about empires, we can now formulate the first law of comparative imperialisms as follows: as an online discussion of empire grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving the Roman Empire approaches 1. (This is a variant of the general law that states that ‘as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1’.) T…
Slavery
This article addresses the issue of slavery. Where society operates to give cultural shape to biological facts in the case of sexuality, it denies cultural identity or cultural significance to slaves, who become ‘mere’ bodies. Most of the written evidence from Greek antiquity comes from the perspective of slave-owners. People cannot know what ancient Greek slaves might have had to say about their experiences of enslavement. There are various ways…
Urban Landscape and Architecture
That the idea of the polis came to stand as a reference point for Hellenic cultural ideals is not, as one might have thought, purely the result of later memory, or memorialization of the political structures that obtained during a rich and productive era in Greek cultural history. This happened, of course; but it built on a conscious attempt by its inhabitants to promote the polis as a centre for cultural identity. This article looks at how the c…
Hellenism and Modernity
This article argues that Hellenism is a controversial concept with a lengthy history, and which ultimately defies all attempts to give it definition. In discussing Matthew Arnold, it suggests that people think of Hellenism as a relationship between a particular past and a perpetually changing present. The ancient Greek world is contested, fragile, and phantasmatic; it is constructed by a gaze that looks intensely back into the past. While the con…
The Gift of the Nile
Plutarch and the Return of the Archaic
A theme repeats itself with such frequency in Plutarch's writings that the critic is obliged to present it here for analysis, the archaic Greek past. It is one of the most striking features of Plutarch's work and is often noted. The Greek past recurs in his literary output throughout the course of his career, from the earliest compositions to the essays of his maturity. This chapter sketches out a response or a set of connected responses to these…
Hellenism and Empire
The Gift of the Nile
Postcolonialism
This article discusses the ‘dialogue’ between postcolonial theory and Hellenistic studies. It highlights this by exploring the act of will and self-identification by which Greece is appropriated to a particular culture, made its history, and put to its service. One important point to which the discussion draws attention is the potentially universal significance that this gives Hellenic studies: just because the appropriation of ancient Greece is …
Music
One area where it is particularly difficult to bridge the gap between text and performance is ancient music. This article notes that people today know very little about how ancient music sounded. It is much easier to relate ancient theories of music to other intellectual endeavours, such as the study of physics, mathematics, or ethics, than to investigate its connections with the work of practicing musicians. There is a paradox here, because anci…
Gender Studies
This article examines the meaning given within different social structures to human individuals, whose relationship even with their own bodies is culturally determined. While ‘gender’ is widely understood to be a hermeneutic tool used in feminist research, its relationship to other feminist approaches is not altogether clear. Gender studies as a field is a relatively recent spin-off from ‘women in antiquity’. Investigation of ancient women, the r…
The Greek Heritage in Islam
This article discusses the attempts of Muslim intellectuals to forge a kind of synthesis between Greek philosophy and Islamic thought, attempts that have parallels in the Christian and Judaic traditions. Classical Muslim culture remained a vibrant and pluralistic phenomenon that often conceived of Greek thought and learning as an indigenous tradition, and as a legitimate precursor to Islamic scholarship.
Games and Festivals
The festivals of the Greek world demonstrate the power of Hellenism as a unifying ideal, together with the vitality and variety of local Hellenic practice. There is a vast array of complementary views of Greek festivals, which between them can help people to reconstruct the perspectives of spectator and competitor, citizen and foreign visitor, emperor and benefactor, cultural centres and cultural margins. That highly varied body of material makes…
The Novel
The novel flourished at a time when Greek identity was above all a matter of cultural affiliation. This article argues that the characters in the novels are fundamentally concerned with issues of gender, ethnicity, culture, and identity – and that their readers must have been too. However, the relationship between the world depicted in the novels and that in which they were written and read remains difficult to characterize: it is remarkable, for…
Biography
This article points out that the genre of biography was also fundamentally concerned with Hellenic identity. As the discussion holds, ancient biographies do not just describe individuals, they tackle a range of issues, chief among which is that crucial question, what it might mean to be Greek. Biography is about individuals. That is what makes it interesting; it is also what leaves it vulnerable to critics who look for something more, for the big…
Historiography
In discussing ancient historiography, this article makes something of the opposite claim: Thucydides – for example – wrote ‘a possession for all time’, but was also a man of his age. The ‘linguistic’ and the ‘cultural’ turn in the study of historiography help situate his work in a broader fifth-century context and acknowledge its strangeness. Among other things, new approaches enable people to rediscover the connections between rhetoric and histo…
Religion
Religion as a subject of research is a product of modern times. With monotheistic religions such as Christianity, it is thought of as an autonomous and self-referential system with a large degree of inner coherence and a binding theology. The Greeks, however, had no word for religion as an abstract category. Religion did not exist outside the contexts in which it was lived. Greek religion lacks the defining features of most modern religions. Clas…
Low Philosophy
Philosophy in an Aristotelian vein speaks a language almost of its own making, with unusual words such as substance, accident, matter, form, actuality, potentiality, entelechy, and the like. The ideal here seems to be that philosophy speaks directly to the mortal devotee, who loses himself in that higher music. And yet there are other dimensions to ancient thinkers, even the systematic ones, which sit uneasily with such a high philosophy. This ar…
Film Studies
Film studies provides the ideal field for further reflection on the issue of Greek culture. It involves the translation of Greek material into a new medium, as well as a new language, a medium furthermore that is characteristically modern. This article points out that this is the medium through which many moderns have their first or only self-aware encounter with ancient Greece. The stories of the Greek world have functioned as meta-narratives or…
Medicine
This article attempts to characterize a secular tradition of medicine, and focuses on approaches to the body and theories of causation. It seems that, just like the street philosophers, magicians were more individualistic and charismatic than the writers of systematic treatises, and yet they too sometimes relied on texts. It is important to remain open to possible connections between magic and medicine. For example, in the course of medical histo…
Lyric Poetry
This article emphasizes the importance of context, and of what is lost, when people approach the study of lyric poetry: even the one complete poem by Sappho turns out to be a fragment, because people can no longer hear the tune to which it was sung, because they do not know for whom she was singing. It suggests that people need to rethink quite radically ancient processes of identification between poets, performers, and audiences; while, at the s…
Numismatics
This article describes the origins of Greek numismatics, the emergence of the discipline, die study, hoards, and future trends. In discussing Greek coins, it presents a vivid case study of a trajectory in Hellenic scholarship observed similarly in archeology. In the early days, when artistic or iconographical interests dominated, coins were often thought of as ‘medals’; today more attention is paid to their social context, including not just thei…
Epic Poetry
The term ‘epic’, when applied to ancient Greek literature, refers to a set of texts that may be loosely defined as narrative poetry about the deeds of gods and heroes. To a very large extent, this is a reflection of Homer's authority as the most famous epic poet. This article argues that recent comparisons between early Greek epic and modern oral traditions, as well as the discovery and investigation of ancient Hittite and Near Eastern texts, pla…
Hellenism in the Renaissance
This article discusses Hellenism in the Renaissance, illustrating how humanist scholarship laid the foundations for modern philology and the later stages of classical studies. It points out the hunger for ancient texts and knowledge that fuelled Renaissance intellectuals such as Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni. A large part of the humanist project was devoted to acquiring Greek texts, translating them into Latin, and studying them with the i…
Tragedy
Tragedy has inspired such feverish activity over the past half-century, both in scholarship and in the theatre, that it is hard to sketch the main lines of past explorations, let alone indicate how they may develop and ramify in the future. This article attempts to do just that. It presents an overview of approaches to tragedy in the recent past, and some divinations about areas of study that may reward interest in the future. Presently, in Greek…
Sexuality and Gender
In discussing sexual identity, this article focuses on specific issues in understanding how individuals could be constructed as sexual beings. The ancient Greeks themselves had no specific or overarching terms for either gender or sexuality, yet distinctions based on biological sex were deeply embedded in the linguistic, cognitive, political, and social structures of their society at all periods. Just as biological sex precedes sexuality in many …
Reception
Collections of scholarly articles on aspects of the ancient world often end with a token article on the later ‘reception’ of the topic under discussion. This article also ends with a paper on reception, but for a different reason. It focuses on the theory of reception, and various examples of its practice within Hellenic studies. The article also notes that together with the preceding articles, ‘reception studies’ cannot be separated out as a met…
Colonies and Colonization
This article suggests that the study of colonies and colonization needs to be situated within wider Mediterranean and Near Eastern contexts and to throw off its parochial conception of Greek history. However, a wider geographical range is not enough by itself to bring the study of ancient colonization out of its current ‘crisis’. Scholars should be rethinking the very terminology they employ, including such words as ‘colonization’, and they ought…
Hellenistic Poetry
This article examines Hellenistic poetry by outlining the gradual separation between literary genres and the performance contexts within which they originally developed. The Hellenistic poets felt the gap and tried to reconstruct a literary past from which they felt separated. In a city like Alexandria, where different cultures and ethnicities coexisted, Greek identity was increasingly seen as a matter of cultural and literary competence, rather …
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