Maurice Lisa

Personal Biographical Information:

I was born and grew up in the UK, where I graduated from Cambridge University with a degree in classics. After making Aliya, I combined teaching English with studying at Bar-Ilan, and received my doctorate (thesis: The Teacher in Ancient Rome) in 2001. I have been teaching at Bar-Ilan since the late 1990s, and my research includes ancient drama, particularly Roman comedy, and classical reception, where I specialize in modern popular culture. I am married with four adult kids, and live in Beit Shemesh.

Research

Although her research field was originally more historical in nature, with her work on Roman education and the book The Teacher in Ancient Rome (Lexington, 2013), Professor Maurice’s research has for the past decade focused on the reception of the classical world. She was particularly drawn to this specialization in recognition of its ongoing relevance in the modern world. Her research focuses on three main areas, modern popular culture, children’s culture and Classics and the Judeo-Christian World

Modern Popular Culture

Professor Maurice is the author of Screening Divinity (Edinburgh University Press, June 2019), as well as the editor of three volumes in the Brill Metaforms series on the reception of the ancient world in popular culture: The Reception of Ancient Greece and Rome in Children's Literature: Heroes and Eagles (Brill, 2015), Rewriting the Ancient World: Greeks, Romans, Jews and Christians in Modern Popular Fiction (Brill, 2017), The Reception of Ancient Virtues and Vices in Modern Popular Culture (Brill, 2017). She is currently finishing a monograph entitled Televising Ancient Rome in the 21st Century (forthcoming, Liverpool University Press) and working on another book, Screening Ancient Israel, to be published by Edinburgh University Press. Together with Dr Ayelet Peer and Mr Neil Bar she is also editing, A Companion to the Classical Receptions of Cleopatra VII, to be published by Brill.

Children’s Culture 

From 2016 -2021 Professor Maurice was a member of the European Research Council funded project Our Mythical Childhood... The Reception of Classical Antiquity in Children’s and Young Adults’ Culture in Response to Regional and Global Challenges (http://omc.obta.al.uw.edu.pl/). This project, led by Professor Katarzyna Marciniak of the University of Warsaw, included Professor Susan Deacy (Roehampton), Professor Elizabeth Hale (University of New England, Australia), Dr Daniel Nkemleke (University of Cameroon) and Professor Maurice. In this project, she was primarily responsible for Our Mythical Education (Warsaw University Press, 2021) which examined the reception of classical myth in formal education worldwide. In addition, she worked on developing a survey database containing 1500 hundred entries that examined items of children’s culture on an international scale, and was responsible for another, separate but connected, database of educational mythological materials.

Within the project, Professor Maurice also worked with Professor Susan Deacy on projects involving classics and autism. This collaboration resulted in the establishment of an organization, ACCLAIM (Autistic Connecting with CLAssically Inspired Myth), to further this endeavour, as well as a programme conducted with Dr Ayelet Peer, for a class of autistic youth at a school in Tel Aviv, using classical mythology to help the children cope with complex emotions.

Professor Maurice is currently involved in a three-year research project funded by the ISF exploring the reception of ancient Rome in British children’s culture, 1945 to present day.

Classics and the Judeo-Christian World

In 2016, Professor Maurice received a grant from the rector of Bar Ilan University to set up a collaborative research group. This group aimed to examine the joint Classical and Judeo-Christian foundations of Western civilization, and their reception. The rationale behind this group’s inception was that both strands have contributed to western societies in areas as diverse as art, philosophy, politics and architecture; and in many cases, the two strands intertwine and play off against each other. Nevertheless, very little sustained research had to date incorporated experts from a wide range of different fields (including Jewish studies, Christianity, Classical studies, European literature, history and art, politics, philosophy etc.), despite the fact that such collaboration would undoubtedly lead to greater understanding. The intention of this research group was to provide enlightenment in a way that individual researchers, in their own closed specialisations, could not. Within this research group, a conference was held on the joint Classical and Judeo-Christian foundations of Western civilization, explored by means of an examination of male and female creation archetypes in creation myths. From this conference, there resulted a book, edited with Tovi Bibring, entitled Prometheus, Pandora, Adam and Eve: Male and Female Archetypes in Creation Myths and their Reception in Western Civilisation (Bloomsbury 2022).