Xavier Buxton awarded postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Cyprus

Xavier Buxton, a current ICS Early Career Research Associate, has recently accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Cyprus. He will move to Nicosia from London in September. We offer him congratulations on his fellowship.

In Cyprus, Xavier will join the GROUPMINDS project, funded by the European Research Council. Building upon his earlier work on the emotions in classical Athens, he will now focus on the chorus, inside and outside drama, as a thinking collective. While this singing-and-dancing group is often spoken of as a unit, with a single ‘identity’, early lyric suggests a complex relationship between the leader and the rest of the chorus. Dithyramb, especially, is a hybrid genre, full of questions and quotations, and rhetorical division. The dramatic choruses, too, sometimes splinter and multiply. They also engage in lengthy sung and spoken dialogue with the protagonist: the group seeks and shares information, stimulates and calibrates emotion, remembers, deliberates, and decides.

Xavier’s research will ask what such choral narratives and consultations reveal about collective affect, agency, and rationality – what contemporary theorists call ‘intermentality’ – in archaic and classical Greece. His work will also contribute to an increasingly lively debate, among ancient historians and political scientists, about the nature of democratic deliberation.