Associate Professor Antonis Petrides, Director of the undergraduate programme “Studies in Hellenic Culture”, Open University of Cyprus and Margarita Alexandrou, Postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Classics and Philosophy, University of Cyprus, are the co-editors of the volume "Constructing Gender in the Comic Mode: Perspectives on Greek and Roman Comic Literature". The volume is scheduled for publication in February 2027 and will appear in De Gruyter’s distinguished series Trends in Classics – Supplementary Volumes. 

 The volume originated in a 2021 international conference jointly organised by the University of Cyprus and the Open University of Cyprus. Far from being a conventional set of conference proceedings, the volume has developed into a sustained collective investigation of the interaction between gender ideology and comic representation across antiquity. 

The volume starts from a simple but consequential premise: although antiquity did not theorise ‘gender’ in modern terms, gender was anything but fixed. It was continuously constructed, negotiated, reinforced, and challenged through social practice and literary representation. The contributions explore what happens when gender is viewed specifically through the comic mode -a mode especially hospitable to exaggeration, inversion, stereotype, obscenity, grotesque embodiment, role-playing, and social transgression. 

The volume’s scope extends deliberately beyond Greek and Roman comedy proper to encompass archaic iambus, Hellenistic and Imperial literature, mimiamb, epigram, dialogue, epistolography, Ovidian narrative, and Roman satire. Across these very different forms, the contributors investigate how masculinity and femininity are made legible, contested, caricatured, destabilised, or reasserted—and how comic discourse can simultaneously expose and reproduce the ideological structures on which gender stereotypes depend. 

Undoubtedly, the volume’s greatest asset is its international cast of contributors, bringing together established authorities and a younger generation of scholars: Ewen Bowie, Laura Swift, Antonis K. Petrides, Margarita Alexandrou, Thomas K. Hubbard, James Robson, Andrea Capra, Paul S. Martin, Athena Papachrysostomou, Serena S. Witzke, Chrysanthi Demetriou, Sabira Hajdarević, Alastair Daly, Lucia Floridi, Heinz-Günther Nesselrath, Andreas N. Michalopoulos, Margot Neger, and Spyridon Tzounakas -scholars working across an unusually broad chronological and generic spectrum.

We hope that the volume will be useful not only to Classicists, but also to scholars of gender and sexuality, literary form, cultural history, and reception -and to anyone interested in the ancient modes of imagining gender and their strikingly persistent cultural afterlives.

Pre-order / book details: https://amzn.to/4coMSja