Justine McConnell

Spring 2026

McMillan-Stewart Fellow

Justine McConnell is Reader in Comparative Literature and Classical Reception at King’s College London. Her research focuses on African diaspora literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, on ancient Greek literature, and on the interconnections between the two. She has written three monographs: Black Odysseys: The Homeric Odyssey in the African Diaspora since 1939 (2013), Performing Epic or Telling Tales (co-authored with Fiona Macintosh; 2020), and Derek Walcott and the Creation of a Classical Caribbean (2023), and has co-edited four volumes on the reception of Graeco-Roman antiquity.

Fellowship Project

Graeco-Roman Antiquity and the Women of the Harlem Renaissance

From Zora Neale Hurston to Nella Larsen and Jessie Redmon Fauset, several female writers of the Harlem Renaissance interwove myths and literature from ancient Greece and Rome into their own modern narratives. In doing so, they entwined past and present, Europe, Africa, and the Americas, to create works of transnational and transhistorical scope that radically re-envisioned the ancient Mediterranean, contesting its long-standing appropriation by dominant powers. Their writings imagine alternative futures and destabilize the structures of coloniality that contribute to uneven and inequitable societies. Yet unlike the male writers of the movement, these women’s dialogues with the ancient Mediterranean tended to render them doubly invisible: not only as women writers in a predominantly male environment, but as Black women engaging with an ancient culture that continued to be primarily associated with whiteness.