Writing from the Margins: New Approaches to Ancient Authorship

This conference seeks to re-envision ancient authorship by exploring the roles played by socially marginalised and overlooked groups in the creation, preservation, and dissemination of ancient texts. It contests traditional views of ancient authors as elite individuals working independently to compose texts for elite audiences. Instead, we approach authorship as a collaborative, shifting, and multilayered enterprise that, we feel, better fits the social realities of the ancient world. Key questions for the conference include:  1) how were slaves, freedmen/freedwomen, and non-citizens involved in the creation of ancient texts and 2) how can we better appreciate texts’ dissemination and preservation by anonymous or uncredited intermediaries such as scribes, pedagogues, graffitists, and performers in the theatre? Building on recent contestation of rigid identity categories, we see ‘status’ itself (in terms of class, race, ethnicity, (dis)ability, citizenship) as fluid and moveable, with individuals moving between enslaved/free, elite/non-elite, citizen/foreigner, disabled/abled during their lifetime or, in some cases, depending on the eye of the beholder. 

Although authorship has long been a contested category in literary and cultural theory, e.g. in the work of Barthes and Foucault, it has not received adequate treatment as a socio-cultural phenomenon in the ancient world. We are interested chiefly in the historical conditions of textual production, and how acknowledging the involvement of marginal authors/authorship can affect our interpretation of extant texts. Given the challenges of ancient evidence, where marginal voices are likely to be elided or downplayed, we are particularly keen to explore new methods and theoretical frameworks for uncovering non-elite authorship and appreciating its significance.

Confirmed conference participants include Dr Tom Geue (ANU); Prof Kristina Milnor (Barnard/Columbia); Dr Lilah Grace Canevaro (Edinburgh); Dr Katherine Backler (Leeds); Prof Peter Kruschwitz (Vienna); and Dr Robin Kreutel (HU Berlin).

This event is being organised by Dr Erica Bexley, Dr Katherine McDonald and Dr Lucy Jackson.

We invite abstracts of 300 words for 20-minute papers on any aspect of non-elite authorship in the ancient world. The deadline for abstracts is Friday 30^th of January, 2026. Please send your submissions and any enquiries to Dr Erica Bexley, erica.m.bexley@durham.ac.uk