Dr Mathura Umachandran

I'm interested in the disciplinary politics of Classics - why and how it has come to be as it is, its borders and exclusionary tactics - as well as critical-theoretical approaches to ancient Greek textss, especially in the precincts of decolonial, postcolonial, and queer thought. My current book project examines key thinkers of the first generation of the Frankfurt School - Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin - and the pressure they apply and the use they make of the notion of (ancient) myth in their ambitious and devastating critiques of concepts such as Enlightenment, law, and civilization. Since 2020 I have co-stewarded a project with Marchella Ward (Open University) called Critical Ancient World Studies. Our collective has published a major intervention in the politics of history writing, in the shape of the edited volume 'Critical Ancient World Studies: The Case for Forgetting Classics' (Routledge 2024; available to read for free online Open Access), rewiring ideas of ancient-ness through a decolonial, specifically Critical Muslim Studies, lens.

Biography:

I'm a child of the Tamil Eelam diaspora, born and raised in London and Essex. I took a BA in Literae Humaniores (Classics 1b) at Wadham College, University ofOxford (2005-2009) where I encountered classical reception studies and learned ancient Greek. An MA in Reception of the Ancient World at Univeristy College London (2010-11) altered my intellectual trajectory permanently, and I pursued this thread across an ocean to Princeton University where I took my PhD in Classics (2011-2018). With a tip of my hat to Hannah Arendt, my PhD dissertation 'Antiquity in Dark Times: Classical Reception in the thought of Erich Auerbach and Theodor Adorno' was the place for me to investigate how ancient texts and particulalry Homer are read, used, and interpreted when totalitarianism comes knocking at the door. As a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Oxford (2018-2019), I worked on the Leverhulme funded 'Anachronism and Antiquity project in its final year before moving to Ithaca, NY to take up a Mellon Postdoctoral fellowship at the Society for the Humanities and the Department of Classics at Cornell University. There I was lucky to be in conversation with brilliant scholars from across the Humanities, as part of the 'Fabrication' and 'Afterlives' fellowship cohorts.