Critical Antiquities invites reflections on the study of worlds identified as ancient or ancestral. The series considers how productive engagement with antiquity—and with the very construction of “the ancient”—exceeds disciplinary boundaries and procedures. More broadly, it explores how events, structures, and practices beyond the academy—from artistic practice to political platforms—inform our engagement with capaciously imagined ancient/premodern worlds in the present.

The series consists of short (no more than 30,000 words) commissioned books from leading scholars working on ancient/premodern material from around the world. The books in Critical Antiquities are organized around a single concept. They are brief and feature robust, essayistic writing that travels easily across disciplines and into the classroom.

By marrying theoretical sophistication to the clarity and urgency of the essay, series books are meant to appeal to readers from undergraduates and graduate students to practicing scholars. We want to reach a broad audience interested in questions of tradition, reception, and the inheritance of the premodern past.

Authors interested in proposing a book for the series are encouraged to reach out directly to Brooke Holmes, Susan Dod Brown Professor of Classics at Princeton University and a former director of the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities, and Mark Payne, Chester D. Tripp Distinguished Service Professor in Comparative Literature, Classics, and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.