Zoë Jennings is a DPhil student with the APGRD, writing a thesis on the reception of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the twenty-first century. Her research traces the ways in which Ovid's oeuvre, and especially his epic, has been constructed as theatrical or ‘performable’, and why contemporary theatre practitioners are turning to the Metamorphoses so especially today. In the contemporary performance scene, Ovid’s poetry is valued for its resonances with a wide range of issues, such as women’s agency, queer narratives, ecology and the posthuman. Practitioners are using Ovid to explore these themes with and through the body in a range of forms, including dance, opera, performance art, puppetry and multimedia installation.
Outside of her research on Ovid, Zoë has also worked on adaptations of the Orpheus myth, with a chapter forthcoming in Ancient Ruins in Contemporary Cinema and Theatre (edited by E. Baudou and A.-V. Houcke).