PERFORMANCES

26 giugno 2025
Le Troiane – Libero adattamento da Euripide
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CONFERENCES

22 settembre 2025
Authority and Empowerment of Female Voices in Greek Tragedy
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24-26 giugno 2025
Female voices in a public context:
authorial articulation and mimetic representation in ancient Greek literature
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25/26 novembre 2024
A Workshop on Pindar’s Fragments in Memory of Franco Ferrari
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24/25 settembre 2024
Ricognizioni sulle voci femminili in contesti pubblici: il modello greco Female voices in public contexts: the Greek model. First Surveys
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TRAINING COURSES

23 ottobre 2024
Per una didattica di genere tra classico e contemporaneo
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The Seminar, addressed to BA students in Literature and MA students in Classical and Modern Philology, was aimed to stimulate reflections on female poetic writing(s) in different historical period. The reception of Sappho was chosen as case study, with a particular focus on her readings and re-writings by female authors from 19^th and 20^th centuries.

LABORATORIES

Laboratorio di Critica di Genere
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The training course, addressed to secondary school teachers, aimed to provide participants with teaching tools on gender issues, not only related to the history, social position and artistic-literary expressions of women, but also to the representation of the female gender and the male gender between the classical era and the contemporary era. The first session was dedicated to the Classical antiquity, with a reflection on the dynamics that lead to the recognition of a female authorship and poetic tradition, as well as on the complex mechanisms of reception of famous female poets of antiquity through the example of Sappho.

SCHOOL LECTURES

SNS School Lectures on Female Voices in Greek Tragedy

The SNS Research Unit (“Female Voices in Greek Drama”) has organized three lectures on women in tragedy at the Licei Classici “G. Carducci” (Milan), “G. Galilei” (Pisa), “N. Machiavelli” (Lucca), held by the postdoctoral researchers Marco Catrambone and Stefano Fanucchi. Although accessible to a non-specialist audience, these lectures aimed at providing a fresh approach to the characterisation of female speeches and songs in tragedy, combining traditional philological and literary analysis (e.g. intertextuality, relationship of tragedy to song culture) with innovative methodologies (pragmatics and sociolinguistics).

The events focused on Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women and Sophocles’ Antigone (Lucca), Euripides’ Medea (Milan) and Hippolytus (Pisa). The lectures on Suppliant Women and Antigone have shown the relevance of female protagonists and their voices to larger socio-political issues: such issues included, on the one hand, hikesia («supplication») and protection from male violence (Aeschylus) and, on the other hand, the challenging of Creon’s tyrannical and vindictive regime by Antigone’s innocent initiative. These two ancient plays were also analyzed through the lens of modern human rights, in the light of cross-disciplinary curriculum on civic education.

Lectures on Medea focused on the authority of female voice. Special attention was paid to Medea’s manipulative rhetorical strategies, analyzed with the tools provided by conversational analysis and politeness theory. This has been complemented by the reading of the choral songs on women’s poetic authority, which rework genres, topoi and metrical patterns of choral lyric. Both lectures have shown how the questioning of male power and female authority in this tragedy is not fixed into indisputable statements, but evolves along with the plot and the interaction between characters.

Sociolinguistics and intertextuality with choral lyric were also taken into account in the lectures concerning Hippolytus, which focused on Phaedra’s relationship with the other female characters. Again, conversational analysis and politeness theory proved to be a very useful tool for interpreting dialogue and characterisation, shedding light on the interaction between Phaedra and the Nurse, while Phaedra’s relationship with the chorus of Troezenian women has been read in the light of the chorus’ employment of specific lyric patterns.

31 marzo 2025
Donne Giuste (view poster)
tragedia e diritti nell’Atene del V secolo

27 febbraio 2025
Fedra e le altre (view poster)
Voci di donne nell’Ippolito di Euripide

03 aprile 2025
Il potere di Medea (view poster)
Autorità della voce femminile in Euripide