Organisation profile

Reception explores the relationship between past and present and the role of the receiver (the reader, viewer or listener) in the transmission of culture. The ways in which texts from other cultures, including the past, are ‘received’ by modern readers is a vital issue in a pluralist and increasingly globalised world. Reception is concerned both with the study of specific examples – such as the way that the ancient Greek historian Thucydides has been cited in debates about current US foreign policy, or the way the Bible has been interpreted by successive centuries – and with the development of theories and methodologies for understanding this process.

Bristol has been a recognised world leader for more than twenty years in the study of the reception of classical antiquity, currently spear-headed through the Institute for Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition, but the scope of the Reception theme is broader, involving academics from all three schools in the Faculty of Arts and covering such topics as interpretations of the Book of Revelation, and the impact of the rediscovery of Pompeii on the popular imagination in the nineteenth century.