Dr Chella Ward is Lecturer in Classics at the Open University. She completed her doctorate in Classics at Oxford, on blindness in the theatre (both ancient and modern), but had been a frequent visitor to the APGRD study room through her undergraduate degree in Classics and English and her MSt. in Classical Languages and Literature, both from the University of Oxford. Chella was the APGRD's acting Archivist-Administrator / Researcher in 2017-18.
Chella's doctoral thesis in Classics from Oxford is published as Blindness and Spectatorship in Ancient and Modern Theatres (Cambridge 2024). She has a chapter on Ted Hughes' and Shakespeare's reworkings of the Pyramus and Thisbe myth from Ovid's Metamorphosesin the APGRD's 2018 volume Epic Performances from the middle ages into the twenty-first century, ed. F. Macintosh, J. McConnell, S. Harrison and C. Kenward (OUP 2018). She has also written on Milton's classical blindness, and on Senecan echoes in the in-yer-face plays of the 1990s.