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Sunday, October 6, 2019

**Special Guest Episode on Classical Monsters and Popular Culture w/Liz Gloyn**

    

In this special guest episode, I am joined by Dr. Liz Gloyn, Senior Lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London, in the United Kingdom. Her primary teaching and research areas focus on the intersections between Roman social history, Latin literature, and ancient philosophy (particularly Seneca the younger and his approach to Stoicism and the family unit). This research led her to publish her book, The Ethics of the Family in Seneca. But Dr. Gloyn also has a strong interest in classical reception, particularly the history of women as professional academic classicists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as the classics in popular media, such as film, television, and young adult fiction. 

It’s that last bit that will be the focus of today’s episode, as Dr. Gloyn and I discuss her forthcoming book, Tracking Classical Monsters in Popular Culture (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019). This work is the first in-depth study on classical reception and monsters in Anglo-American popular culture from the 1950s to the present day. Throughout the book, Dr. Gloyn reveals the trends behind how we have used the monsters, and develops a broad theory of the ancient monster and its life after antiquity, investigating its relation to gender, genre and space to explore what it is that keeps drawing us back to these mythical beasts and why they have remained such a powerful presence in our shared cultural imagination. Specifically, her book takes us through a comprehensive tour of monsters on film and television, from the much-loved creations of Ray Harryhausen in Clash of the Titans to the monster of the week in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, before examining in detail the post-classical afterlives of the two most popular monsters, the Medusa and the Minotaur. 


Dr. Liz Gloyn
Senior Lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London
Website: https://lizgloyn.wordpress.com/


Elizabeth Gloyn

***You can order Dr. Gloyn's new book here (Bloomsbury Publishing or Amazon)***

Tracking Classical Monsters in Popular Culture