Edith Hall studied for a BA degree in Classics & Modern Languages after winning a Major Scholarship to Wadham College, Oxford (awarded with First Class Honours in 1982) and a DPhil degree at St Hugh's College, Oxford (awarded in 1988).[7] She was Leverhulme Chair of Greek Cultural History at the Durham University, Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford,[7] and visiting chairs at several North American institutions.
Known for her humorous style of lecturing,[8] Hall has made many television and radio appearances,[9] as well as acting as consultant for professional theatre productions by the National Theatre, Shakespeare's Globe, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Live Theatre in Newcastle, and Theatercombinat in Germany.[10] In February 2014 she appeared on BBC2 Newsnight and recited a newly discovered poem of Sappho in ancient Greek as the credits rolled.[11] Her central research interests are in ancient Greek literature, especially Homer, tragedy, comedy, satyr drama, ancient literary criticism and rhetoric, Herodotus and Xenophon, although her publications discuss many other ancient authors including Lucian, Plutarch, Artemidorus, Menander, Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle, and other ancient evidence including metre and versification, papyri, painted pottery and inscriptions. She is also an expert on classical reception – the ways in which ancient culture and history have informed later epochs, whether in later antiquity or modernity, and whether in fiction, drama, cinema, poetry, political theory, or philosophy. Her research has been influential in three distinct areas: (1) the understanding of the performance of literature in the ancient theatre and its role in society, (2) the representation of ethnicity; (3) the uses of Classical culture in European education, identity, and political theory.[citation needed]
Hall has stated that Aristophanes is the person she would most like to meet from the ancient world.[12]
She was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2022.[13]
Ancient theatre and society
Several of her books argue that theatre plays an important role in intellectual and cultural history, especially because entertainments reach lower-status audiences. These include Greek and Roman Actors (2002, with Professor Pat Easterling), and The Theatrical Cast of Athens (2006), which incorporates a revisiting of Inventing the Barbarian in the light of developments in international history since 1989. New Directions in Ancient Pantomime (2008), the first study of the balletic performance of mythological narratives which educated mass audiences across the ancient Mediterranean world for several centuries, was praised by D. Feeney, Prof. of Latin at Princeton University, as 'indispensable for all students of the Roman Empire.'[14] Her book, Greek Tragedy: Suffering under the Sun, argues that Greek tragedy is a deeply philosophical medium, includes an essay on every surviving ancient Greek tragedy and has been described as 'admirably exhaustive'.[15] Her 2013 book Adventures with Iphigenia in Tauris: A Cultural History of Euripides' Black Sea Tragedy is a detailed history of the impact of an often neglected tragedy by Euripides, covering its presence in vase-painting, Aristotle, Latin poetry, Pompeian murals, Roman imperial sarcophagi and literature including the ancient novel and Lucianic dialogue.[16]
When a lecturer at Oxford in 1996 she co-founded, with Oliver Taplin, the interdisciplinary APGRD (Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama). The project collects and analyses materials related to the staging and influence of classical plays. The project's ten co-edited volumes, of which Hall is lead editor of seven and contributor to nine, have been described as playing 'a pivotal role in establishing the parameters and methodologies of the study of the reception of Classical drama in performance'.[17] The most substantial book to emerge from the project is the 220,000-word Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre 1660–1914, co-authored with Professor Fiona Macintosh, which in 2006 was shortlisted for both the Theatre Society Book of the Year Prize (2006), the J.D. Criticos prize and the Runciman Prize.
From 1996 to 2003, Hall contributed to the Oxford World's Classics Euripides series, which included all nineteen of Euripides’ extant plays, newly translated by James Morwood and Robin Waterfield. Hall provided the introductions to each of the five volumes, drawing out the modern parallels with the texts. In the introduction to Bacchae and Other Plays, she explored Euripides’ supposed ‘radicalism’,[18] quoting the critic F. L. Lucas: “not Ibsen, not Voltaire, not Tolstoi ever forged a keener weapon in defence of womanhood, in defiance of superstition, in denunciation of war, than the Medea, the Ion, the Trojan Women.” [19]
Representation of ethnicity
Hall's first monograph, Inventing the Barbarian (1989), argued that ancient European identity relied on the stereotyping as 'other' of an Asiatic enemy. Her argument that ancient ideas about ethnicity underlie modern questions of nationalism, racism and ethnic self-determination has been extremely influential in Classics,[20] and regarded as 'seminal' by scholars in other fields.[21][22] This work was developed in her scholarly commentary on the Greek text of Aeschylus' Persians, with English translation (1996), and in the essay collection she edited Cultural Responses to the Persian Wars (2007).
Classics and society
In recent years, Hall's research has also incorporated later Cultural History, especially the social role played by the presence of ancient Greece and Rome. Her books in this area include The Return of Ulysses: a Cultural History of Homer's Odyssey (2008, shortlisted for the Criticos Prize), noted by The New York Times for its scholarship and accessibility.[23] This was followed by two collections of essays on ancient slavery and one on the uses and abuses of Greek and Roman texts and ideas in the relationship between India and Britain 1757–2007.
Hall is the Principal Investigator on The People’s History of Classics, a project which presents and amplifies the voices of British working-class women and men who engaged with ancient Greek and Roman culture between 1789 and 1917. This began as an AHRC-funded research project based at King's College, London, called Classics and Class in Britain 1789-1917.[24]
Hall delivered the J P Barron Memorial Lecture at the Institute of Classical Studies on Wednesday 7 June 2017 on Classicist Foremothers and Why They Matter.[25]
Selected publications
Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (OUP, 1989)
