As members of a global collaborative project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Classics at the Crossroads: Partnership, Mobility, and Exchange Between Ghana, Nigeria and Canada, we recently held a conference at University College London entitled Classics and/in Africa (July 3-4, 2025). This conference was intended to facilitate a flexible and open-ended dialogue, where Africa is at once the focus of research and the site of current disciplinary praxis. Recent scholarship in Classics has both redirected the exclusive focus on ancient Greece and Rome to study of the broader ancient Mediterranean as a space of diversity and connectivity and traced the transmission of classical antiquity in cultures and regions beyond the West. Such work includes the study of ancient African cultures, representations of Africa by Greco-Roman authors, and African receptions of the Classics. Speakers at the conference offered innovative contributions to these topics, at once building on previous work and pointing toward new directions for the future. We now wish to draw on this rich, varied cache of papers for two publication projects.

The first will be a special, guest-edited issue of the online, open access journal Res Difficiles on Classics and Africa. We anticipate that this special issue will be a focused distillation of approaches to the question of what Classics means in Africa, represented by four to six essays (each approximately 6000 words in length). The essays in this volume, rather than privileging a single paradigm for African Classics, will speak to the diversity of approaches, including points of debate and disagreement. Topics and sub-fields may include, but are not exclusive to, African receptions and adaptations, comparative studies, representations of Africa in antiquity, and analyses of Classics’ colonial legacy and/or globalizing approaches to the Classics. We anticipate that this special issue will be published in 2027.

The second publication project will be a larger edited volume on Classics and/in Africa (press TBA—we have already received some expressions of interest). This volume will feature essays on the themes outlined above by scholars from all regions of the world; it will also include space for scholarship in Classics by Africa-based researchers that may or may not thematize Africa (approximate publication date in 2028).

We hereby invite expressions of interest for both publication projects. You may indicate a preference for either publication project, but keep in mind that the editors will make the final decision as to acceptance and publication venue and that all submitted essays will go through the peer-reviewing process. Potential contributors should submit an abstract of no more than one page in length to Luke Roman (romanl@mun.ca) by February 2, 2026.

Hasskei Majeed (U. Ghana), Justine McConnell (KCL), Olakunbi Olasope (U. Ibadan), Luke Roman (Memorial University)

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