In a time of acute crisis when our societies face a complex series of challenges (race, gender, inclusivity, changing pedagogical needs and a global pandemic) we urgently need to re-access the nature of our engagement with the Classical World. This edited collection argues that we need to discover new ways to draw on our discipline and the material it studies to engage in meaningful ways with these new academic and societal challenges. The chapters included in the collection interrogate the very processes of reception and continue the work of destabilising the concept of a pure source text or point of origin. Our aim is to break through the boundaries that still divide our ancient texts and material culture from their reception, and interpretive communities. Our contributors engage with these questions theoretically and/or through the close examination of cultural artefacts. They problematise the concept of a Western, elitist canon and actively push the geographical boundaries of reception as both a local and a global phenomenon. Individually and cumulatively, they actively engage with the question of how to marshal the classical past in our efforts to respond to the challenges of our mutable contemporary world.
