Dr Leo Kershaw completed his DPhil in Classical Languages and Literature at Balliol College in 2024 and is a sessional lecturer at the University of Warwick in Greek language and literature. His DPhil project, supervised by Fiona Macintosh, investigated how Euripides’ Medea has been adapted and reinterpreted in South Africa from the 19th to the 21st century, focusing on the entanglement of the performance history of Medea with colonialism and racialisation and its gradual decolonisation. In 2024 he co-convened the Institute of Classical Studies and Classical Reception Studies Network’s seminar series, ‘Out of the Shadows of Empire’. He works as an Archive Assistant at the APGRD.
Leo has written for the CRSN Realigning Reception Takeover 2022 (‘“Beware of the neo-colonial wolf”: World Reception, Universality, and Decolonising the Academy’) and a digital exhibit for Re-Imagining Tragedy from Africa and the Global South ‘The Academic in the Archive: Tracing the Workshopping Process of Oedipus at Colonus #aftersophocles’ (2024). He contributed a chapter for the forthcoming Blackwell-Wiley Companion to Hercules (ed. George W.M. Harrison), on ‘Herakles Outside the Western Canon’ and is contributing to the forthcoming Intersectional Medeas (ed. Zina Giannopoulou and Jesse Weiner) and Archiving and Performing Antiquity: Reshaping the Canon (ed. Justine McConnell, Sofia Frade, and Cécile Dudouyt).