Zoë Jennings (she/her) works on the reception of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in twenty-first century performance, covering not only theatrical productions but also dance, live art and multimedia installations. The twenty-first century has seen a remarkable proliferation of such works, and her thesis works from the hypothesis that today's ‘performed’ Ovid arises from and responds to the construction of a ‘postmodern’ Ovid in the scholarship and culture of the late twentieth century. The thesis traces the intersection of stories from the Metamorphoses with contemporary thinking around materiality and media, gender and queerness, and post-humanism and the Anthropocene in both performance spheres and wider cultural debates. She is particularly interested in the ways in which Ovid’s Metamorphoses are used by theatre-makers and performance practitioners, themselves already deeply concerned with questions of reception and ‘re-performing’, to reflect on the mechanics of receiving, re-doing, re-appropriating, or resisting.
