Sentimental Journeys: Andromache in the Torrid Zone

The 2026 annual Classics and English lecture will be delivered by Dr Miranda Stanyon (University of Melbourne), in the Ioannou Centre lecture theatre and online at 2pm on Tuesday 12 May.

"The Trojan woman Andromache was ubiquitous in eighteenth-century British culture, at home on the stage and page, in music and material culture, high-toned history painting and everyday ephemera. While Andromache’s most striking receptions today often connect her with post-war displacement and the plight of refugees, in the eighteenth century she was a thoroughly domesticated subject, bound up with discourses of hearth and home in a period when female conduct was under intense and changing pressures. ‘Domestick Virtues concern all the world,’ as the Spectator observed, ‘and there is no one living who is not interested that Andromache should be an imitable Character.’ Yet toward the end of the century, English writers increasingly sent out Andromache figures into foreign parts. How was this domestic paragon appropriated and deployed in scenes of colonial encounter and empire building? What might her travels bring to conversations in comparative and world literature? This lecture addresses such questions through the case of John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative, of a Five Years’ Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796), a bestselling depiction of a slave plantation society, and a text whose habits of classical quotation have gone largely unremarked."

For more information and to join online, visit the APGRD event webpage.