Project at HIAS
Popular culture, popular morality, and class in classical Athens
At HIAS, Douglas Cairns will work towards two monographs, one provisionally entitled Restraining the Powerful in Greek Popular Morality and the other to be called Virtue and Vicissitude: Emotion, Ethics, and Exemplarity in the Greek Tradition. This work forms part of the UKRI-funded project, Class Struggle in Ancient Greek Democracies (led by Mirko Canevaro, Edinburgh) on which Douglas Cairns is Co-Investigator. His contribution investigates how forms of popular culture and popular morality were used to rein in elite arrogance and restrain elite power, focusing on themes that emerge in archaic poetry, but especially on their presence in classical drama, in ethics and political philosophy, and in Athenian oratory.
His Tandem Partner is Werner Rieß, Professor of Ancient History at University of Hamburg.
Website
Funding
The HIAS Fellowship is provided by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and the federal and state funds acquired by Universität Hamburg in the framework of its Excellence Strategy.
Tandem
Prof. Dr. Werner Rieß, Ancient History, University of Hamburg
Biography
Douglas Cairns has been Professor of Classics in the University of Edinburgh since 2004, having previously worked at Glasgow, Leeds, Otago, and St Andrews. He has held visiting positions at Cagliari, Fu Jen (Taipei), Kyoto, Pisa (Statale and Normale), Siena, Tokyo, and Zürich, as well as fellowships awarded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Göttingen, Berlin, Dresden), the Leverhulme Trust (Göttingen), the University of Oxford, and Technical University Dresden. In 2012 he was George R. Langford Family Eminent Scholar Chair at Florida State University, and from 2018 to 2023 he held an Anneliese Maier-Forschungspreis awarded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. His research has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), the Leverhulme Trust, and the European Research Council (Advanced Grant 2018–23, Honour in Classical Greece). He was elected to Academia Europaea in 2013, to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2018, and to the British Academy in the same year.
Douglas Cairns works on ancient Greek society, ethics, literature, and thought, especially the emotions and issues of interpersonal recognition.
His HIAS Fellowship is provided by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and the federal and state funds acquired by the University of Hamburg in the framework of its Excellence Strategy.
Image Information
Sisyphus, by Tiziano Vecellio, 1548/ 1549, Museo del Prado