The Critical Antiquities Network (CAN) was established in 2020 to link scholars working at the intersection of ancient traditions and contemporary critical theories. Critical Antiquities (CA) is an approach with a recognisable history, insofar as critical theorists have long been working with ancient materials, for example Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, and Judith Butler, not to mention Marx and Nietzsche. In its first phase, CAN was a means for facilitating and platforming new work by leading scholars that examined and exemplified this approach.
Beginning in 2025, CAN has pivoted in the attempt to give a more definite shape to CA and so catalyse further field-defining work. That means, in the first instance, attempting to articulate more precisely what the CA approach is. As the current co-directors understand it, the idea of CA stems from a certain idea of critique; namely, the negation of inhibitive phenomena and the enactment of alternative lives in an emergent present. Critique so understood finds a powerful impetus in dialogue with the thought and practice of alternative worlds because they offer an alternate pole from which to grasp the present in its historical situation, both in terms of what ought to be transformed and for disclosing its immanent but alternative possibilities. Antiquities—all manner of them, certainly not just "Classical" ones—provide promising pathways for encountering such alterity, provided they are studied with the rigour of ongoing collective and reflexive scholarly practice. Only then may our modalities of critique be founded upon the expansive dialogues we enter into with the form and content of antiquities’ performances, literatures, and practices. This turn to antiquity is not a romantic one. Rather, antiquity simultaneously serves as a standpoint and object of critique to enliven us to the possibilities and limitations of contemporary life.
In the ambition to more definitely and precisely articulate CA, we do not wish to be restrictive. This relative narrowing of CAN is intended to be generative and enabling above all else, an invitation for people to think with and use a collective vision and thereby co-create it. One starting point for such collaboration is conversing with its antecedent interlocutors. To so do, please see the Publications page of this site. We invite input from anyone interested and invested in this work. Please familiarise yourself with our activities and contact the co-directors to get involved:
Tristan Bradshaw (University of Wollongong)
Ben Brown (University of Sydney)
Tom Geue (Australian National University).
enquiries@criticalantiquities.org
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Tristan BradshawCo-Founder and Co-DirectorLecturer in Liberal Arts, University of WollongongTristan Bradshaw is a political theorist and classicist. Before joining the fine faculty and students in the School of Liberal Arts, University of Wollongong in 2022, Tristan lectured on political theory at the University of Sydney and enjoyed a year as Research Fellow in Classics and Ancient History there. He earned his PhD from Northwestern University, Illinois, in 2021 with a dissertation on use and utility in Aristotle and Marx.
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Ben BrownCo-Founder and Co-DirectorSenior Lecturer in Classical and Ancient History, University of SydneyBen Brown is a historian of early Greek thought and literature. He studied with David Phillips and Edwin Judge at Macquarie University where he obtained his PhD. Ben has taught Greek and Roman language and history at Macquarie, ACU, UNSW before joining Classics and Ancient History at University of Sydney where he is Senior Lecturer in Classics. Ben is the author of The Mirror of Epic (2016) and is currently working on a monograph, Figures of Autonomy in Early Greece.
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Tom GeueCo-DirectorSenior Lecturer in Classics, Australian National UniversityTom Geue teaches Classical Studies at the Australian National University. His interests range from the mysteries of anonymous writing in the ancient world, including the books Author Unknown: The Power of Anonymity in Ancient Rome (2019) and Juvenal and the Poetics of Anonymity (2017), to Marxist criticism on classical Latin poetry, to the space shared between classical philology and socialist politics in the 20th century (Major Corrections: An Intellectual Biography of Sebastiano Timpanaro). His work has been recognised with the award of a Philip Leverhulme Prize (2021) and an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (2023).
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Michèle LowrieCouncil MemberAndrew W. Mellon Distinguished Service Professor in Classics and in the College, University of ChicagoMichèle Lowrie is the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Service Professor of Classics and the College at the University of Chicago. In addition to earlier books and edited volumes on Horace, Augustan Rome, Vergil reception, figures of thought, and exemplarity, she has more recently published Civil War and the Collapse of the Social Bond (Cambridge 2022) together with Barbara Vinken and is finalizing The Invention of Security in Early Imperial Rome, also for Cambridge. She has held numerous residential fellowships in Princeton, England, and Germany, received a Burkhardt Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, a Loeb Classical Library Foundation Fellowship, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and given the Gray Lectures at Cambridge.
For more information, please contact us at enquiries@criticalantiquities.org.
Alternatively, contact the co-directors:
Tristan Bradshaw
tbradshaw@uow.edu.au
Ben Brown
benjamin.brown@sydney.edu.au
Tom Geue
tom.geue@anu.edu.au
Critical Antiquities YouTube Channel
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