Justine McConnell is Reader in Comparative Literature and Classical Reception at King’s College London. Her research, and often her teaching, focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century receptions of the ancient Mediterranean, particularly by writers of the African diaspora. Currently, she is working on classical reception in the Harlem Renaissance, a project that has been supported by fellowships at Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies (Autumn 2025) and Hutchins Center for African and African American Research (Spring 2026).
Justine is the author of Black Odysseys: The Homeric Odyssey in the African Diaspora since 1939 (OUP, 2013), Performing Epic or Telling Tales (co-authored with Fiona Macintosh; OUP, 2020), and Derek Walcott and the Creation of a Classical Caribbean (Bloomsbury, 2023). She has also co-edited four volumes on the reception of Graeco-Roman antiquity: Ancient Slavery and Abolition: From Hobbes to Hollywood (OUP, 2011), co-edited with Edith Hall and Richard Alston; The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas (OUP, 2015), with Kathryn Bosher, Fiona Macintosh, and Patrice Rankine; Ancient Greek Myth in World Fiction since 1989 (Bloomsbury, 2016), with Edith Hall; and Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century (OUP, 2018), with Fiona Macintosh, Stephen Harrison, and Claire Kenward.
Justine co-convenes two international networks dedicated to the exploration of the reception of Greek and Roman antiquity: the Classical Reception Studies Network, with Lucy Jackson, and the Classics and Poetry Now network with Elena Theodorakopoulos.
