Marchella Ward – författare

Uncover the stories of gods and goddesses from around the world, in this dynamic anthology of ancient myths.Discover 23 captivating stories of gods and goddesses from civilisations around the world in this book that introduces children to ancient cultures with colourful illustrations and incredible storytelling. Young readers will delight in myths that explain the beginning of the world, the way gods helped humans, the divine's power over weather and other natural phenomena, and much more. Gods of the Ancient World is a perfect global introduction to the most fascinating stories about gods and goddesses from ancient history. Further featuring: - The incredible myths and legends behind each god or goddess with real-world art references. - Illustrations bring each god and goddess to life for a young audience.- Fact boxes call out key information to draw the reader in.- A global look at mythologies, with Maya, Japanese and Yoruba deities as well as Ancient Greek and Roman gods.Authored by Classics expert Marchella Ward, a researcher at the University of Oxford, this beautifully illustrated treasury of ancient mythologies is perfect for children age 9-12, with amazing real-life photos of ancient objects which show how people worshipped the gods through art.

Uncover tales of ancient beasts, in this beautiful anthology of mythologiesThis book introduces children to the thrilling mythological beasts from ancient civilisations. Discover 23 stories accompanied by beautiful, colourful illustrations. Through the incredible storytelling you can learn about fantastic creatures such as the Japanese baku, which had the power to devour nightmares, the wise Egyptian Sphinx, and the fearsome Minotaur who went head-to-head with Theseus in Greek mythology. Featured pages highlight amazing real-life photos of objects, showing how each beast was represented in art.A perfect, global introduction to the most fascinating stories about legendary creatures from ancient history.

We’ve been sold a story about the ancient world: Greece gave us democracy, Rome gave us law, and the West inherited the lot. It’s a neat, noble timeline. It is also a dangerous lie. In Classicism: How the West Invented the Ancient World, Marchella Ward reveals this specific version of history for what it really is: not a neutral record of facts, but the structural foundation for modern Islamophobia.What links the genocides of the Palestinians in Gaza, the Uyghurs in East Turkestan, and Muslim populations in India? In a word, ‘classicism’—the dominant narrative of world history in which nations and peoples find their origins in a pre-Islamic time. Muslims are, in this narrative, a people without ancient history: scandalous outsiders who threaten the myth of the nation.Urgent, accessible, and unapologetic, Classicism demands a counter-narrative to the standard Western script. Ward finds the building blocks for this new history in Islamism, long positioned as the enemy, but here offering vital provocations towards a better world not just for Muslims but for all those living on the underside of colonial modernity.

The use of disability as a metaphor is ubiquitous in popular culture - nowhere more so than in the myths, stereotypes and tropes around blindness. To be 'blind' has never referred solely to the inability to see. Instead blindness has been used as shorthand for, among other things, a lack of understanding, immorality, closeness to death, special insight or second sight. Although these 'meanings' attached to blindness were established as early as antiquity, readers, receivers and spectators into the present have been implicated in the stereotypes, which persist because audiences can be relied on to perpetuate them. This book argues for a new way of seeing - and of understanding classical reception - by offering assemblage-thinking as an alternative to the presumed passivity of classical influence. And the theatre, which has been (incorrectly) assumed to be principally a visual medium, is the ideal space in which to investigate new ways of seeing.

This volume explores and elucidates critical ancient world studies (CAWS), a new model for the study of the ancient world operating critically, setting itself against a long history of a discipline formulated to naturalise a hierarchical, white supremacist origin story for an imagined modern West.CAWS is a methodology for the study of antiquity that shifts away from the assumptions and approaches of the discipline known as classical studies and/or classics. Although it seeks to reckon with the discipline’s colonial history, it is not simply the application of decolonial theory or the search to uncover subaltern narratives in a subject that has special relevance to the privileged and powerful. Rather, it dismantles the structures of knowledge that have led to this privileging, and questions the categories, ideas, themes, narratives, and epistemological structures that have been deemed objective and essential within the inherited discipline of classics. The contributions in this book, by an international group of researchers, offer a variety of situated, embodied perspectives on the question of how to imagine a more critical discipline, rather than a unified single view. The volume is divided into four parts – “Critical Epistemologies”, “Critical Philologies”, “Critical Time and Critical Space”, and “Critical Approaches” – and uses these as spaces to propose disciplinary transformation.Critical Ancient World Studies: The Case for Forgetting Classics is a must-read for scholars and practitioners teaching in the field of classical studies, and the breadth of examples also makes it an invaluable resource for anyone working on the ancient world, or on confronting Eurocentrism, within other disciplines.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

This volume explores and elucidates critical ancient world studies (CAWS), a new model for the study of the ancient world operating critically, setting itself against a long history of a discipline formulated to naturalise a hierarchical, white supremacist origin story for an imagined modern West.CAWS is a methodology for the study of antiquity that shifts away from the assumptions and approaches of the discipline known as classical studies and/or classics. Although it seeks to reckon with the discipline’s colonial history, it is not simply the application of decolonial theory or the search to uncover subaltern narratives in a subject that has special relevance to the privileged and powerful. Rather, it dismantles the structures of knowledge that have led to this privileging, and questions the categories, ideas, themes, narratives, and epistemological structures that have been deemed objective and essential within the inherited discipline of classics. The contributions in this book, by an international group of researchers, offer a variety of situated, embodied perspectives on the question of how to imagine a more critical discipline, rather than a unified single view. The volume is divided into four parts – “Critical Epistemologies”, “Critical Philologies”, “Critical Time and Critical Space”, and “Critical Approaches” – and uses these as spaces to propose disciplinary transformation.Critical Ancient World Studies: The Case for Forgetting Classics is a must-read for scholars and practitioners teaching in the field of classical studies, and the breadth of examples also makes it an invaluable resource for anyone working on the ancient world, or on confronting Eurocentrism, within other disciplines.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.