The historical and cultural space of the Black Atlantic - a diasporic world of forced and voluntary migrations - has long provided fertile ground for the construction and reconstruction of new forms of classicism. From the aftermath of slavery up to the present day, black authors, intellectuals, and artists in the Atlantic world have shaped and reshaped the cultural legacies of classical antiquity in a rich variety of ways in order to represent their identities and experiences and reflect on modern conceptions of race, nation, and identity.

The studies presented in this volume range across the Anglophone, Francophone, and Hispanophone worlds, including literary studies of authors such as Derek Walcott, Marlene NourbeSe Philip, and Junot Díaz, biographical and historical studies, and explorations of race and classicism in the visual arts. They offer reflections on the place of classicism in contemporary conflicts and debates over race and racism, and on the intersections between classicism, race, gender, and social status, demonstrating how the legacies of ancient Greece and Rome have been used to buttress racial hierarchies, but also to challenge racism and Eurocentric reconstructions of antiquity.

Ian Moyer's profile page

Adam Lecznar's profile page

Heidi Morse's profile page

Ian Moyer is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Egypt and the Limits of Hellenism (CUP, 2011), as well as articles on cultural and intellectual interactions between ancient Greece and Egypt. His other interests include ancient religion and magic, as well as modern receptions of ancient civilizations and cultures. In his current research, he is examining the gates and forecourt areas of Egyptian temples in the Ptolemaic period as sites of cultural and political translation.

Adam Lecznar is currently an Honorary Research Fellow in UCL's Department of Greek and Latin. His research interests range across classical reception studies and he has published on Friedrich Nietzsche's reception of Plato and Prometheus, the classicism of James Joyce, and the reception of Hesiod. He has taught at UCL, Bristol, Royal Holloway, and Oxford since the submission of his doctorate on Wole Soyinka's reception of Euripides' Bacchae in 2013, and is currently completing a monograph entitled Dionysus after Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy in Twentieth-Century Literature and Thought.

Heidi Morse is a Lecturer at the University of Michigan, where she was a 2014-2016 Du Bois-Mandela-Rodney Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies. Her book-in-progress, titled Teaching and Testifying: Black Women's American Classicism, theorizes a new cultural history of the relationship between classical rhetoric and race in nineteenth-century America. She has also authored articles on American women's poetry, slave narratives, and African American print and visual culture which have appeared or are forthcoming in venues including Comparative Literature, Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, and The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Literature.