Dr Katie Fleming, BA MPhil PhD (Cambridge)

Profile

I started academic life as a classicist, reading Classics at King’s College, Cambridge (where I also did my MPhil and PhD). My doctoral research was in the reception of Greek literature and thought in the 30s and 40s, with particular focus on the philosophies of Theodor Adorno and Martin Heidegger. Despite my classical background, I was lucky enough to find a home in the English Department in Queen Mary, where it’s been my privilege to teach my research interests in the philosophical and theoretical reception of antiquity.

Undergraduate Teaching

I have taught on:

• ESH243 Architexts
• ESH270 The crisis of culture: literature and politics, 1918-1948
• ESH293 The Long Contemporary
• ESH348 Ancient Myth - Modern Theory
• ESH393 Feminism(s)

Postgraduate Teaching

I have taught on:

• ESH7013: James Joyce's Finnegans Wake
• ESH7034: Modernism and After
• ESH7036: Researching Modern Culture

Research

Research Interests:

• The classical tradition
• The role of antiquity in modern intellectual thought, philosophy, and theory, from the late eighteenth century to the present
• The place of the ancient world in twentieth-century and contemporary literature
• The politics of reception

Recent and On-Going Research:

My most recent research has been concerned with the ethics and politics of Martin Heidegger’s reading of Sophocles’s Antigone, and the (Greek) Sphinx, from antiquity to the present, and this iconic figure’s role in narratives of desire, death, knowledge, and subjectivity.

I am currently working on a book project about the role of classical thought in the intellectual history of critical theory and the Frankfurt School.

Publications

Selected Publications:

• 'Antigone and humanism: the politics of Occupation and Liberation', International Journal of the Classical Tradition (forthcoming)
• ‘The sphinx and another thinking of life,’ in Classical literature and posthumanism, ed. G.M. Chesi and F. Spiegel (London, Bloomsbury: 2020)
• ‘Heidegger’s Antigone: Ethics and Politics,’ in Tragedy and the Idea of Modernity, ed. J. Billings and M. Leonard (Oxford, OUP: 2015)
• 'For everyone must answer the sphinx: Ted Hughes' translation of Seneca's Oedipus', Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (2013)
• with T. Grant (eds), 'Introduction,' Seneca in the English Tradition, Special Volume of Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (2013)
• with A. Simon (eds), 'Introduction,' The Reception of Classical Antiquity in German Literature (Iudicum, 2013)
• 'Odysseus and Enlightenment: Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialektik der Aufklarung', International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 19 (2012), 107-28
• 'Heidegger, Jaeger, Plato: The Politics of Humanism', International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 19 (2012), 82-106
• ‘Fascism’, A Companion to the Classical Tradition, ed. C. Kallendorf (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 342-54
• ‘Fascism on Stage: Jean Anouilh's Antigone’, in Laughing with Medusa: Classical Myth and Feminist Thought, ed. M.Leonard and V. Zajko (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 163-86
• ‘The Use and Abuse of Antiquity: The Politics and Morality of Appropriation’, in Classics and the Uses of Reception, ed. C. Martindale and R. F. Thomas (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 127-37

Edited Volumes:

• with T. Grant (eds), Seneca in the English Tradition, Special Volume of Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (2013)
• with A. Simon (eds), The Reception of Classical Antiquity in German Literature (Iudicum, 2013)

Supervision

I would welcome enquiries from potential doctoral students interested in any of the areas of my research.

I have recently supervised the following successful PhD projects:

• Michael Gilbert: 'Modern Post-Christianities: James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger' (2014)

• Ahren Warner, 'Contradictions in Coherence: Three Poets and the Poetics of the Commodity as Fetish' (2012)