Current Ph.D. students in Classics At NUI Galway

Francesca Bezzone

Deconstructing the Man, creating the Saint: The literary sanctification of Saint Germanus in the Vita Germani Auctore Constantio

This study is centred on the analysis of the evolving figure of Saint Germanus in the Vita Germani Auctore Constantio, from mortal, mundane man at the beginning of the text to fully sanctified figure in its last chapters. My aim is to propose a new reading of the text, based on literary, semantic, liturgical and theological analysis, where the sanctification of Germanus is made all the more evident through intra-textual details and inter-textual comparisons with other hagiographies of the time, such as the Vita Martini, the Vita Amatoris and the hagiographical work of Jerome.

Email: f.bezzone1nuigalway.ie
Supervisor: Dr Mark Stansbury

Sarah Corrigan

The sea in early medieval Hiberno-Latin and latinate literature: Cosmological problem and imaginative resource

This research project is investigating conceptualisations of the sea in Ireland as evidenced by Hiberno-Latin and Latinate writings from the sixth to early ninth centuries. It explores the ability of the sea to accommodate a broad range of diverse conceptualisations and allegorical assignations. It also examines the unique perspectives of the sea found in Ireland as a consequence of its insular nature and its location at the very edge of what was, at that time, the known world.

E-mail: s.corrigan2nuigalway.ie
Supervisor: Prof. Michael Clarke
Funding: Irish Research Council Postgraduate Scholarship (2011–2013)

Peter Ferguson

Conflicting Doctrines: How North African Christian Authors Reconciled Their Religious Beliefs in a Pagan World.

This project will examine the cross cultural encounters between the pagan and Christian worlds in North Africa during the fifth and sixth centuries AD. North African culture was infused by paganism, and pagan literature was a dominant element historically and within contemporary society. This conflicted with the ideas of Christianity and caused concern among Christian authors. Several works from Christian authors shall be examined to determine how they reconciled this conflict.

E-mail: petertfergusongmail.com
Supervisor: Prof. Michael Clarke
Funding: Galway Doctoral Research Scholarship

Peter Kelly

Synthesizing identity and text in Ovid’s Metamorphoses

This work examines Ovid’s portrayal of identity and its relationship with the text in the Metamorphoses. Through analysing a number of myths from the Metamorphoses this work shows how Ovid explores the fracturing of identity in relation to the body, voice and visual image of a person, while also demonstrating how Ovid uses the text as a metaphor for the self as the authorial voice enters the echo-chamber of intertextuality.

E-mail: pkelly131gmail.com
Supervisors: Prof. Michael Clarke and Dr Amanda Kelly
Funding: Irish Research Council Postgraduate Scholarship; Hardiman Fellowship

Jason O’Rorke

Voice of Ancients: An examination of verbal diathesis and its didactic practices in Latin grammars from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages.

My research analyses the theory and the terminology of verbal diathesis in Latin grammatical treatises of the Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages (3rd–10th century AD). Furthermore, it examines the didactic methods employed by Latin grammarians to lead their students (and, more generally, their readers) through the intricacies of grammatical theory. The thorough investigation of these teaching techniques should improve our understanding of Ancient and Early Medieval linguistic education and language learning.

E-mail: j.ororke1nuigalway.ie
Supervisor: Dr Jacopo Bisagni
Funding: NUI Galway College of Arts and Social Science Fellowship 2010–2011; Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences 2011

Ph.D. Projects Recently Completed

Dr Eóin O'Donoghue (2011)

The study of the lives of men and women in ancient Greece and Rome has attracted scholarly attention. However, there has been a comparative neglect of the study of gender identities in the world of the Etruscans. It was the purpose of this thesis to partially rectify this situation through the examination of the gender identities of men and women from Archaic Etruria (c. 600–450 BC). Unlike most previous scholarship on gender the approach employed was not grounded in feminist thought, instead the aim was to seek to analyse the differences in the roles, activities and identities of men and women during this time. The apparent power of Etruscan women was carefully analysed, it was shown that while they had many significant public roles and duties, they were performed within the framework of a hegemonic masculine society. The public and private identities of men were examined within their social and political environment.

The evidence employed was primarily artistic. As well as explaining the respective roles of men and women the evidence was considered in its environmental, regional, and historical setting. This allowed for the understanding of gender roles in the respective regions of Etruria at different points during the period examined, and significantly how gender as a medium of social difference was used in their civilisation.

E-mail: eoinmodgmail.com
Supervisor: Dr Edward Herring, FSA
Funding: College of Arts, Social Sciences and Celtic Studies Postgraduate Fellowship

Dr Anastasia Remoundou-Howley (2011)

Palimpsests of Antigone: Contemporary Irish versions of Sophocles’ tragedy

My thesis explores the reception of Sophocles’ Antigone in contemporary Irish drama with works by Aidan Carl Mathews (Antigone 1984), Tom Paulin (The Riot Act 1984), Brendan Kennelly (Antigone 1984), Conall Morrison (Antigone 2003), Seamus Heaney (The Burial at Thebes 2004), Stacey Gregg (Ismene 2007), and Owen McCafferty (Antigone 2008). The creative synergy between original text and adaptation, from page to stage, is symptomatic of an archipelago of literary and philosophical responses to Antigonean discourses which reroute politics and ethics into a current critique that extends far beyond the field of Classical studies. Through the lens of inherited interpretations and postmodern theorizations, with which all of these writers are familiar, I seek to demonstrate that the implications of Antigone’s mourning act, in the text and through performance, can be read as tropes for a post-humanist discussion redirected into the political sphere. In this way, these Irish adaptations, written in response to modern national and international tragedies, contest notions as varied and complex as ’agency’, ’representation’ versus ’disappearance’, ’mourning’, ’democracy’, ’law’, ’violence’, ’cultural identity’, ’gender’, ’mothering’, ’kinship’, ’war’, ’suffering’, ’memory’, ’trauma’, and the defense of human rights by revisiting Ireland’s violent historical past and redefining its role in the present beyond the narrow interpretative borders of an assumed anti-colonial terrain. I therefore submit that by reimaging itself as Other on Antigone’s legitimate space, the stage, and textually, these Irish playwrights, from the North and the South of the island, challenge Western logocentrism and democratic ideals from within by refiguring Antigone’s defiance as a protest against injustices inside the boundaries of their country and in the world at large. The contexts through which Antigone is palimpsestuously re-inscribed within Irish theatre exemplifies a metaphora (as ’transposition and as ’translation’) into new spaces and new possibilities of an agonistic pluralism that, being political, liberates Antigone from the confines sanctioned by Classical tradition. Antigone thus returns on the Irish stage since 1984 as the autonomous individual against the state, as the worn-out anti-heroine and mock-sacrificial martyr perpetually vanishing from the final act (Mathews), as a Republican rebel (Paulin), as a feminist icon (Kennelly), as an avenger/suicide bomber (Morrison), as a human rights defender (Heaney), as displaced by her sister Ismene (Gregg), and as a mothering pacifist in post-conflict Northern Ireland (McCafferty).

E-mail: tasharemhotmail.com
Supervisor: Prof. Brian Arkins

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