My doctoral project, which is co-funded by the AHRC OOC DTP and the Clarendon Fund, explores the reception of Mediterranean antiquity in the work of the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, highlighting how Herbert constructs his own model of reception based on his personal conception of temporality and its relation to the materiality of both past and present. Thus reading Herbert's reception practice, as well as his meta-reflections on issues such as historical distance and the mediation of contact, as reception theory in its own right, I hope to contribute to current debates on the wider applicability of individual reception models and to interrogate the role the body and its material environment can play in such wider applications.
