About The People

The Project Director was Lorna Hardwick, when Professor of Classical Studies at the Open University, UK.

Over the life of the project, she was assisted by the following:

Anastasia Bakogianni is a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Classical Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. She is also an Honorary Associate of the Department of Classical Studies at The Open University. She specialises in the reception of Athenian tragedy, in particular in theatre, poetry and cinema. In addition to her monograph Electra Ancient and Modern: Aspects of the Tragic Heroine’s Reception, Institute of Classical Studies Supplement 113 (2011) she has edited a collection titledDialogues with the Past: Classical Reception Theory and Practice, Institute of Classical Studies (2013).

Alison Burke (Project Research Consultant)  After spending several years composing and delivering the award-winning education strategy / programme for the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum, Alison is now managing 2 of Scotland's most iconic castles for the National Trust for Scotland - Drum Castle and Craigievar Castle in Aberdeenshire.

Deborah Challis (Project Consultant)

Carol Gillespie Project Officer prior to her retirement from the university in 2010; Research Consultant during the updating phase of the Poetry Database June-October 2014). Carol has a first degree from the Open University in Humanities with Classical Studies. As Project Officer (1996-2010) her role included overseeing the organisation of conferences and the dissemination of publications which made available the project's research to the wider community. She also had responsibility for the technical aspects of the project including the original online drama database and the project website. She co-convened the annual ESeminar and prepared archived ESeminar papers for web publication. She is co-editor of Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds (Oxford, 2007). 

Edward Hadley is the author of The Elegies of Ted Hughes  (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and founding editor of The Ted Hughes Society Journal.

Ruth Hazel (Project  Research Consultant) studied English Literature at the University of Southampton, took a Master's Degree in Shakespeare Studies at The Shakespeare Institute, The University of Birmingham, and moved into Classical Studies in 1993 when she became Research Assistant to the Reception project. This led to an interest in the relationship between modern British Theatre and ancient Greek drama, and she completed her O.U. doctoral thesis on ' The mediation in late-twentieth century English theatre of some Texts and Images from Greek tragedy concerned with women and power' in December 1998.  She teaches for the Open University and for an American undergraduate school owned by Franklin and Marshall College, Pa., but based in Bath.

Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author ofAphrodite's Tortoise: the veiled woman of Ancient Greece; Ctesias: History of Persia, and King and Court in Ancient Persia as well as numerous articles and edited volumes on ancient gender, historiography, and reception studies. He is the series editor of Edinburgh Studies in Ancient Persia and co-series editor of Screening Antiquity (both for Edinburgh University Press). Forthcoming books includeThe Culture of Animals in the Ancient World and Designs on the Past: How Hollywood Created the Ancient World.

Isobel Hurst (Project Research Assistant,during 2006) is Lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. She studied Classics and English at the University of Oxford and went on to an M. Phil and D.Phil. in English Studies, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Bristol University's Institute of Hellenic and Roman Studies. Her book, Victorian Women Writers and the Classics: The Feminine of Homer, was published by Oxford University Press in October 2006. Some of her work on classical allusion and references in modern poetry for the Reception project has been published in Living Classics: Greece and Rome in Contemporary Poetry, ed. S. J. Harrison (OUP, 2009), and in a special issue of the Classical Receptions Journal edited by Fiona Cox and Elena Theodorakopoulos: Translation, transgression, transformation: contemporary women authors and classical reception (2012). ​

Tony Keen (Project Research Consultant) works on the reception of Classical texts in popular culture, with particular interests in science fiction and cinema. He is currently working on the presentation of Roman Britain on screen. 

Rosemary Wilkinson (Project Research Consultant); documented two female poets, Eavan Boland and Olga Broumas.