DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS AND ANCIENT HISTORY
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About the department
Research
Vanda Zajko
Senior Lecturer in Classics
Phone: +44(0)117 928 9851
Email: v.zajko@bristol.ac.uk
Research
Dr Zajko has wide-ranging research interests in the reception of classical myth and literature, particularly in the 20th century, and in psychoanalytic theory and feminist thought. She has published on a variety of ancient and modern authors including Homer, Aeschylus and Ovid, Shakespeare, Keats, Melanie Klein, James Joyce, Freud, Mary Shelley and Ted Hughes. She is currently editing the Blackwell Companion to the Reception of Classical Myth to which she will contribute an essay on the reception of the myth of Demeter and Persephone by Victorian writers and a volume entitled Classical Myth and Psychoanalysis: Ancient and Modern Stories of the Self for Oxford University Press. She is also working on an essay on Robert Graves’ Greek Myths for Graves and the Classics ed. Gibson to be published by OUP, an essay on The Homeric Hymn to Demeter for a Routledge volume Sex in Antiquity: New Essays on Gender and Sexuality in the Ancient World ed. Rabinowitz and Robson and an essay on Greek Tragedy, Shakespeare and Modernity for Tragedy and the Idea of Modernity ed. Billings and Leonard. In the longer term her plans include a monograph on the use of classical myth and literature by psychoanalysts of the British School and a volume exploring the interpenetration of classical and modernist literature.
Dr Zajko would be interested in supervising graduate dissertations on the reception of classical myth and literature in the 19th and 20th centuries and on any aspect of psychoanalytic literary criticism and classical literature.
Select publications
- ‘Ted Hughes and The Classics’ in The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes ed. Gifford (CUP 2011)
- ‘Tragedy, Psychoanalysis and Dance: Martha Graham’s Night Journey’ in The Ancient Dancer in the Modern World ed. Macintosh (OUP, 2010)
- ‘”Listening With” Ovid: Intersexuality, Queer Theory and The Myth of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus’ Helios (2009) 36.1
- ‘Mutilated Towards Alignment?: Prometheus on His Crag and the ‘Cambridge School’ of Anthropology’ in Ted Hughes and the Classics ed. Rees (OUP, 2009)
- Co-editor (with Aleka Lianeri) of Translation and 'The Classic’: Identity as Change in the History of Culture’ (OUP, 2008)
- 'Women and Greek Myth' in The Cambridge Companion to Myth ed. Woodward (CUP, 2007)
- ‘Narratives of Tragic Empathy: Prometheus and Frankenstein’ in Tragedy in Transition ed. Annes Brown & Silverstone (Blackwell, 2007)
- ‘What Difference Was Made?’: Feminist Models of Reception’ in The Blackwell Companion to Classical Reception Studies ed. Hardwick & Stray. (Blackwell, 2007)
- 'Hector and Andromache: Identification and Appropriation' in Classics and The Uses of Reception ed. Martndale & Thomas (Blackwell, 2006)’
- Co-editor (with Miriam Leonard) of Laughing with Medusa: Classical Myth and Feminist Thought (OUP, 2005)
- '"Petruchio is Kated": Ovid and The Taming of the Shrew' in Shakespeare and the Classics ed. Martindale & Taylor (CUP, 2004)
- ‘Homer and Ulysses' in The Cambridge Companion to Homer (CUP, 2004)
Dr Zajko is currently Undergraduate Faculty Education Director for the Faculty of Arts.