The Studio is for experimental or otherwise risky research that attempts to angle ancient expertise towards a liberatory politics in our contemporary moment. It is especially for younger scholars, whether they need to air an energising new article idea or would benefit from a dedicated workshop on their first book manuscript. Our aim is to build a room of our own within the strained and straitened world of higher education, a place where new and fiery ideas can wend their way into the world.

Ask almost any professional historian of any ancient past what grips them to study their subject. They will often tell you they find the strangeness, the alienness, the difference of the past compelling. But to what end can that difference be put? The same historian might say that there need be no end. The past should be studied on its own terms, for its own ends. Another historian might tell you the past can shed light on the present through the continuities of human behaviour. ‘Let the tyrannical Roman emperor tell us about the rise of authoritarian strong men!’ Both these models of facing the past – absolute, irreconcilable difference, and facile continuity – have their limitations.

There is another way. It is our belief that the distant past can be used to intervene in some of the bigger problems of our moment, precisely through its distance and difference. The study of ancient worlds produces unique capacities and insights that can be leveraged as a means for critiquing our present. The case normally made for the ongoing relevance of ancient history in the neoliberal university is that it teaches generic ‘critical thinking’ skills transferable to the problems of the corporate sphere. Our view is that the inquiry into various antiquities can be, at best, not just a bland training camp for ‘skills’ to grease the wheels of our current political dispensation, but a way of pointing to the limits of that system, and what a better future might look like beyond it. The critical study of ancient pasts, in other words, can be a way of imagining our world differently.

The Studio for Critical Antiquities is a space dedicated to that pursuit. Much of the energy within ancient world studies at this juncture is being channelled into the urgent task of critiquing the chequered history of the discipline of ‘Classics’ as a field complicit in, and even responsible for, the emergence of white supremacy. We view the task of the Studio as different from, yet complementary to, this serious enterprise. We want to turn attention also to the positive affordances of studying antiquity: its liberatory potential, its role in radical traditions past and present, the theoretically and practically enabling antiquity of Marx and Freud rather than the ideological scaffolding of fascism. Our conviction is that antiquity and its study need not be flattened as a monolithic obstacle blocking the way of human flourishing. It has been and can be a vehicle for advancing that cause.

The Studio is an initiative of the Critical Antiquities Network, a broad collective of scholars working at the intersection of ancient traditions and contemporary critical theories. The Studio, however, is more future-oriented. It is designed to build the next generation of scholars working on antiquity. It is not so much about encouraging new work applying critical theory to interpret ancient evidence, though that sort of intellectual move will undoubtedly loom large. It is about supporting new research on various antiquities and their traditions, and especially research that also reflects on Critical Antiquities as an approach: its techniques, methods, history, sources, purposes, and other pertinent topics. This research pushes the study of ancient worlds towards intervening in the big contemporary questions around how we structure our social order. We think that students of antiquity have something to say on these questions. They only need a forum to say it in.

The Studio will be hosted by the Australian National University, with the collaboration of the Universities of Wollongong and Sydney; its activities, however, will take place mostly online, to maximise international reach. It will be focussed on nurturing the work of early career classicists, intellectual historians, and any younger researchers working on ancient traditions in any part of the globe. We want this space to activate the artistic connotations of the word ‘studio’: a place for study, but also a place for art, experimentation, and intellectual boldness.

For more information or to pitch a paper, contact tom.geue@anu.edu.au.