Professor Alastair Blanshard FAHA
Fellow
- Bio/Profile
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Blanshard is Paul Eliadis Chair of Classics and Ancient History and Director of the RD Milns Antiquities Museum at the University of Queensland, where he convenes the Bachelor of Advanced Humanities (Hons) and the program in Western Civilisation. He has published four books and numerous book chapters.
His research involves looking at the impact that the Greek and Roman world have had post-antiquity, with a particular focus on the effects of Greek culture. How have ideas, artworks and artefacts generated in antiquity impacted on the Modern – from the Renaissance through to the 21st century. His work to date has been largely involved in looking at the impact that has had on sexuality. For example, his book Sex: Vice and Love from Antiquity to Modernity discussed the impact that the ancient discourses of the erotic, the discourse of same-sex love, had on modern notions of sexology and male body image – it is largely a 19th century book because that’s when the discourse of sexuality is really cemented. He has written a book Classics on Screen: Greece and Rome on Film which is a 20th/21st century book and one on the impact of Hercules on western culture, Hercules: A Heroic Life. What is it about Hercules? He’s a murderer, he’s a transvestite, he’s a rapist, and he’s the most popular figure that has endured from antiquity.
So the next logical step is to go to the 18th century. The idea is that Romanticism makes Greece accessible with its love of ruins, with its love of the primitive, with its admiration of landscape - all of these things make Greece a fantastic place for the Romantics. If you don’t have Romanticism as a crutch – as was the case for most 18th-Century travellers - Greece is a degenerate barren place. Pre-Romantic Greece was a difficult concept to love. What did ancient Greece have that appealed to that group? What strategies did they employ that made Greece accessible? The argument he advances is a lot of the strategies they employed - like the reconstruction of things; recreating and imagining what it looked like in its hey-day; imagining that you’re battling the wilderness, so you see yourself as on campaign – were all important strategies which had a legacy in terms of classics and archaeology.
