The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Cognitive Theory

The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Cognitive Theory is an interdisciplinary volume that examines the application of cognitive theory to the study of the classical world, across several interrelated areas including linguistics, literary theory, social practices, performance, artificial intelligence and archaeology. With contributions from a diverse group of international scholars working in this exciting new area, the volume explores the processes of the mind drawing from research in psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology, and interrogates the implications of these new approaches for the study of the ancient world.

Topics include: cognitive linguistics applied to Homeric and early Greek texts, Roman cultural semantics, linguistic embodiment in Latin literature, group identities in Greek lyric, cognitive dissonance in historiography, kinesthetic empathy in Sappho, Artificial Intelligence in Hesiod and Greek drama, the enactivism of Roman statues and memory and Art in the Roman Empire.

This ground-breaking work is the first to organize the field, allowing both scholars and students access to the methodologies, bibliographies and techniques of the cognitive sciences and how they have been applied to classics.

Peter Meineck holds the endowed chair of Professor of Classics in the Modern World at New York University, USA. He is also an Honorary Professor of Classics at the University of Nottingham, UK and the Founding Director of Aquila Theatre. His most recent publications include Theatrocracy: Greek Drama, Cognition and the Imperative for Theatre (Routledge 2017), Combat Trauma and the Ancient Greeks (ed. With David Konstan, 2014) and a new translation of Aristophanes Frogs (forthcoming). He is also Rescue Captain of the Bedford Fire Department in New York.

William Michael Short joined the Department of Classics & Ancient History at the University of Exeter, UK, in 2017, after holding positions at The University of Texas at San Antonio and Loyola University, Maryland, both in the USA. He earned his Ph.D. in Classics from the University of California, Berkeley, USA, in December 2007. He has edited or co-edited several volumes of papers including Embodiment in Latin Semantics (2016), Toward a Cognitive Classical Linguistics (forthcoming), and (in Italian) Con i Romani: Studi antropologici del mondo antico (2014). His journal articles include studies of Latin’s metaphors of time (2016), communication (2013), and mind (2012), as well as an analysis of the Latin preposition de from the perspective of image-schema theory.

Jennifer Devereaux is an advanced PhD candidate in Classics at the University of Southern California, USA. She is a member of the Computational Social Sciences Laboratory at USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute and is currently a visiting postgraduate researcher at the University of Edinburgh, UK, in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology. She has written a number of volume chapters on the topics of embodied cognition, historiography and rhetoric. Her graduate thesis demonstrates the pre-linguistic structure of Latin texts and develops a cognitive-sociological approach to Latin literature.