Augusta is an AHRC funded doctoral researcher in English at Goldsmiths. Her research explores the reception of ancient Greek literature and women’s writing in the classical metascholarship of scholar-poet Anne Carson. She defines metascholarship as a form of critical or creative writing that comments on its own status as a work of scholarship, as well as on scholarly practices more broadly.
Carson’s idiosyncratic engagement with ancient Greek literature is yet to be fully explored by classical reception scholars. Attending to this gap in existing criticism, Augusta’s research addresses Carson’s critical classical receptions as a mode of metascholarship. Her thesis demonstrates how Carson’s radical repackaging of the classics operates as a metatextual critique and remediation of the discipline of classics, as well as the history of classical scholarship – the latter of which is rarely discussed in relation to reception studies. The growing interest in women’s writing within classical reception studies, combined with the scarcity of criticism on Carson’s reflexive academic practice, provides scope for a timely and original study.
Analysing Carson’s translations and classical receptions, Augusta demonstrates how in Carson’s metascholarly approach to reading, writing, and translating ancient Greek texts, she is committed to rethinking the nature of classical scholarship – from critiquing the history of the discipline to suggesting new and meaningful ways readers can ethically engage with antiquity. Her research situates Carson’s critical classical receptions within a countercultural tradition of women writers whose own engagement with Greek antiquity shaped their self-reflexive writing practice. Augusta hopes to contribute to the ongoing conversations surrounding the history of classical scholarship ‘as a promising field of future reception studies’ [See Constanze Güthenke, ‘Shop Talk. Reception Studies and Recent Work in the History of Scholarship’, Classical Receptions Journal, 1.1 (2009), 104–15 (p. 104), https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clp009]
As part of her doctoral training, Augusta is currently undertaking a placement with the open-access peer-reviewed postgraduate journal Brief Encounters in the role of Senior Editor. She works part-time for Classics for All, a charity that raises funds to support the teaching of classical subjects in state schools across the UK. Augusta is a member of the Advisory Board for Sex Ed Matters, a social enterprise that tackles sex and relationship taboos in UK schools, which she co-founded in 2019.
