Christopher Stray is Honorary Research Fellow, Dept of History and Classics, Swansea University, and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London. He has been a member of the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2012); Jackson Brothers fellow, Beinecke Library, Yale University (2005); and visiting fellow, Wolfson College, Cambridge (1996-8). He is currently working on a collection of his published and unpublished essays (OUP), a book on classical commentaries (with C.S. Kraus), a collaborative book on Liddell and Scott (with M. Clarke, J. Katz and J. Ma), and a collaborative history of Trinity College, Cambridge.
PUBLICATIONS
Authored Books
Classics in Britain, 1800-2000 (OUP, forthcoming)
Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities, and Society in England 1830-1960 (OUP, 1998).
The Living Word. WHD Rouse and the Crisis of Classics in Edwardian England
(Bristol Classical Press/Duckworth), 1991.
Edited books (contributions listed separately below)
Sophocles’ Jebb: A Life in Letters. (Cambridge Philological Society, 2013).
(with S.J Harrison) Expurgating the Classics: Editing Out in Greek and Latin (London: Bloomsbury, 2012).
Classical dictionaries: Past, Present and Future (London: Duckworth, 2010).
(with D.J.Butterfield) A.E.Housman, Classical Scholar (London: Duckworth, 2009).
(with Judith Hallett) British Classics Beyond England: Its Impact Inside and Outside the
Academy (Waco TX: Baylor University Press).
Remaking the Classics: Literature, Genre and Media in Britain 1800-2000 (London:
Duckworth, 2007).
Gilbert Murray Reassessed: Hellenism, Theatre, and International Politics (OUP, 2007)
(with L.P. Hardwick) A Companion to Classical Receptions (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007).
Oxford Classics: Teaching and Learning 1800-2000 (London: Duckworth, 2007).
Classical Books: Scholarship and Publishing 1800-2000 (BICS supp. 101, 2007).
Travellers to Greece (Classical Association, 2006).
The Owl of Minerva: the Cambridge Praelections of 1906. Reassessments of Richard Jebb,
James Adam, Walter Headlam, Henry Jackson, William Ridgeway and Arthur Verrall.
Procs Cambridge Philological Soc., supp vol. 28, 2005.
The Classical Association: the First Century, 1903-2003. Greece & Rome,
supplementary volume. (OUP, 2003).
(with Jonathan Smith) Cambridge in the 1830s: the Letters of Alexander Chisholm
Gooden, 1831-1841 (Boydell and Brewer, 2003).
(with Jonathan Smith) Teaching and Learning in 19th-century Cambridge (Boydell
& Brewer, 2001).
Classics in 19th and 20th century Cambridge: Curriculum, Culture and Community.
Procs Cambridge Philological Society, Supplementary vol. 24, 1999.
Winchester Notions: the English Dialect of Winchester College, from an unpublished
glossary by C. G. Stevens. (London: Athlone Press, 1998.)
Introductions to reprint editions
Glare, P.G.W. (ed.), The Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012), x-xvii.
Sandys, J.E., A History of Classical Scholarship (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011).
Smith, W. (ed.) Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (London:
I.B.Tauris, 2008.
An American in Victorian Cambridge: Charles Astor Bristed’s Five Years in an English
University (1852), University of Exeter Press/University of Chicago Press, 2008,. xiii – xxxiv.
W. Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Culture (London : I.B.Tauris, 2008).
Quarterly Journal of Education [10 vols, 1831-5] (London: Routledge, 2008).
Smith, W. (ed.) Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (London: I.B.Tauris, 2007).
Watson, F., Encyclopedia and Dictionary of Education [1921-2], 4 vols (Bristol: Thoemmes, 2003).
Kiddle, H. and Schem. A.J., Cyclopaedia of Education [1887], 2 vols (Bristol: Thoemmes).
[various authors,] Slang in 19th-century England, 5 vols (Bristol: Thoemmes, 2002).
Carlisle, T., Concise Description of the Endowed Schools of England and Wales [1818], 6
vols (Bristol: Thoemmes, 2002).
The Mushri-English Pronouncing Dictionary. A Chapter in 19th- century Public- School Lexicography (Berkeley/Swansea, privately printed, 1996).
Grinders and Grammars: a Victorian Controversy (The Textbook Colloquium, 1995).
Articles in journals and books
‘Education 1780-1880’ in Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, Vol.
3, ed N. Vance and J. Wallace (OUP, forthcoming, 2014).
(with S. Wallace) ‘The Earl and the Doctor’, Scottish Historical Journal (forthcoming, 2014)
‘The absent academy in 19th-century Britain’, Hyperboreus (St Petersburg) (forthcoming, 2014)
‘Classics’ (ch.12, 423-42) in R. Louis (ed.), History of Oxford University Press, III: 1896-1970 (OUP, 2013).
‘Classics’ (ch.10, 435-70), ‘Education’ (ch.11, 472-510), ‘History, law’ (part of ch.13, 559-82) in vol. 2 (ed. S Eliot), of S.Eliot (ed.), History of Oxford University Press, II: 1780-1896 (OUP, 2013).
‘A semi-sacred monster: Charles Wordsworth’s Graecae Grammaticae Rudimenta’, in Classics and the Book Trade from the Sixteenth Century, edited by Robin Myers, Michael Harris and Giles Mandelbrote (British Library, forthcoming, 2014.
‘Virgil in English education’, in R. Thomas and J. Ziolkowsky, eds, The Virgil Encyclopedia
(Wiley, 2013).
‘Rank (dis)order in Cambridge 1753-1909: the Wooden Spoon’, History of Universities
XXVI/1 (2012), 163-201.
(with Arthur Burns) , ‘The Greek-play bishop: polemic, prosopography and nineteenth-century prelates’, Historical Journal 54.4 (2011), 1013-38.
‘Lex Wrecks: a tale of two Latin dictionaries’, Dictionaries 32 (2011), 66-81.
‘Reading silence: the books that never were’, in A. Verlinsky et al. (eds.), Variante loquella. Alexandro Gavrilov septuagenario (=Hyperboreus 16-17, 2010-2011), 527-38.
‘Women and Classics in Victorian Oxbridge: parallels and contrasts’, in D. Lateiner, B. Gold and J. Perkins (eds), Roman Literature, Gender and Reception: Domina Illustris, London: Routledge 2013, 252-66.
‘T. B. Macaulay’, in A.T. Grafton, G. Most and S. Settis (eds), The Classical Tradition
(Harvard University Press, 2011).
‘ “Patriots and professors”: a century of Roman studies, 1910-2010’, Journal of Roman
Studies 100, 1-31 = Britannia 41, 1-31, both 2010.
‘Liddell and Scott: myths and markets’, in Stray (ed.) Classical Dictionaries: Past,
Present and Future (Duckworth, 2010), 94-118.
‘Housman and R.C.Jebb: intellectual styles and the politics of metre’, Butterfield and Stray
(eds) A.E.Housman, Classical Scholar (Duckworth, 2009), 155-74.
(with Gillian Sutherland) ‘Educational publishing’ in D.J. McKitterick (ed.), Cambridge
History of the Book in England vol 6: 1830-1914, (CUP, 2008), 359-81.
Introduction, pp. xiii – xxxiv, An American in Victorian Cambridge: Charles Astor Bristed’s
Five Years in an English University (1852), University of Exeter Press/University of
Chicago Press, 2008.
(with Robert Ackerman) ‘An unknown contemporary review of K.O. Müller’s History and
Antiquities of the Doric Race’, Illinois Classical Studies 50 (2006), 181-218 [published
2007].
‘The rise and fall of Porsoniasm’, Cambridge Classical Journal 53 (2007), 40-71.
‘Non-identical twins: Classics in nineteenth-century Oxford and Cambridge’, 1-13, in
Oxford Classics (London: Duckworth, 2007).
‘Sir William Smith and his dictionaries: a study in scarlet and black’ (pp.35-54) and ‘Jebb’s
Sophocles: an edition and its maker’ (pp.75-96), in Classical Books: Scholarship and
Publishing in Britain since 1800, (London: Institute of Classical Studies, 2007).
‘Politics, Culture, and Scholarship: Classics in the Quarterly Review’, in J. Cutmore (ed.)
Conservatism and the Quarterly Review (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007), 87-106,
233-8.
‘Classics’, in L. Howsam et al, ‘What the Victorians learned’, Journal of Victorian Culture 12
(2007), 263-7.
‘Paper wraps stone: the beginnings of educational lithography’, Journal of the Printing
Historical Society ns 9 (2006), 13-29.
‘The history of the discipline’, in B. Sparkes et al, eds, Edinburgh Companion to Ancient
Greece and Rome (Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 3-8.
‘Marshall’s Cambridge’, in T. Raffaelli, G. Becattini and M Dardi (eds), The Elgar
Companion to Alfred Marshall (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2006), 99-104.
‘Teaching and learning the classics’, in C. Kallendorf (ed.) Handbook of the Classical
Tradition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 5-14.
(with Mary Beard) ‘The Academy abroad: the Nineteenth-century origin of the British
School at Athens’, in M. J. Daunton, ed, The Organization of Knowledge in Victorian
Britain (OUP/British Academy, 2005), 371-87.
‘Charles Astor Bristed’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online), October 2005.
‘From oral to written examination: Oxford, Cambridge and Dublin 1700-1914’, History of
Universities 20.2 (2005), 76-130.
‘Flying at dusk: the 1906 praelections’, 1-12, and ‘Reading Jebb: life and afterlife’,
13-24, in The Owl of Minerva, Procs Cambridge Philological Society supp. vol. 28, 2005.
‘Scholars, gentlemen and schoolboys: the authority of Latin in nineteenth and twentieth-
century England’, in C. Burnett and N. Mann (eds), Britannia Latina: Latin in the Culture of Great
Britain from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (OUP, 2005), 194-208.
‘The Glynnese Glossary: language and identity in Victorian families’, in Lord Lyttelton,
Contributions towards a Glossary of the Glynne language, 1851 (Newcastle: Cambridge
Scholars Press, 2005), vii-lv.
Articles on W.H.D. Rouse, H. J. Roby, E. A. Sonnenschein, J. P. Postgate, Marion
and Julia Kennedy, E. D. A. Morshead, T. H. Key, E. H. Barker, Gilbert Murray for
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 60 vols (OUP, 2004).
Articles on 35 classical scholars, for Dictionary of British Classicists, 3 vols, ed.
R.B.Todd (Bristol: Thoemmes, 2004).
‘Edward Adolf Sonnenschein and the politics of linguistic authority in England 1880-
1930’, in A. Linn and N. McLelland (eds), Flores Grammaticae: Essays in Memory
of Vivien Law (Münster: Nodus, 2004), 211-19.
‘From one Museum to another: the Museum Criticum (1813-26) and the Philological Museum (1831-
3)’, Victorian Periodicals Review 37 (2004), 289-314.
Promoting and defending: reflections on the history of the Hellenic Society (1879) and the Classical
Association (1903) (Classical Association centenary lecture, 2003).
‘The foundation and its contexts’, 3-22; ‘Getting under way: challenge and
response, 1904-22’, 23-37; ‘A lull between two storms: from the 1920s to the
1950s’, pp. 38-41; ‘The CA’s publications’, 107-21, in Stray (ed.) The Classical
Association: the First Century, 1903-2003 (OUP, 2003).
‘Sexy ghosts and gay grammarians: Kennedy’s Latin Primer in Britten’s Turn of the
Screw’, Paradigm 2 .6 (2003), 9-13.
‘Mrs Gladstone’s drawers: Language and identity in Victorian families’, Australasian
Victorian Studies Journal 9 (2003), 1-16.
Introductory essay to Smith and Stray (eds) Cambridge in the 1830s: The Letters of
A.C.Gooden (Boydell and Brewer, 2003), 1-17.
(with Margaret Harris) ‘Charles Waldstein waits upon George Eliot’, George Eliot-
George Henry Lewes Studies 44-45 (2003), 12-25.
‘Classics in the curriculum up to the 1960s’, in J. Morwood, ed., The Teaching of
Classics (CUP, 2003), 1-5.
‘The pen is mightier than the spade: archaeology and education in nineteenth-century
England’, Pharos (Netherlands Institute in Athens) 10 (2002: published 2003), 121-32.
‘A pedagogic palace: the Feinaiglian Institution and its textbooks’, Long Room
[Trinity College Dublin] 47 (2002), 14-25.
‘Purity in danger: the contextual life of savants’, in S.J. Harrison (ed) Texts, Ideas,
and the Classics (OUP, 2001), 265-84.
‘The shift from oral to written examination: Cambridge and Oxford, 1700-1914’,
Assessment in Education, 8.1 (2001), 35-51.
‘Curriculum and style in the collegiate university: Classics in nineteenth-century
Oxbridge’, History of Universities, 16.2 (2001), 183-218.
‘A parochial anomaly: the Classical Tripos 1822-1900’, in J. Smith and C.Stray (eds)
Teaching and Learning in 19th-century Cambridge (Boydell & Brewer, 2001), 31-44.
‘The first century of the Classical Tripos: high culture and the politics of curriculum’,
in Stray (ed) Classics in 19th and 20th century Cambridge: Curriculum, Culture
and Community. Procs Cambridge Philological Society, Supp.vol. 24, 1999, 1-14.
‘Schoolboys and gentlemen: classical pedagogy and authority in the English public
school’, in N. Livingstone and Y. L. Too (eds), Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics of
Ancient Learning (CUP, 1998), 29-46.
‘Renegotiating Classics: the politics of curricular reform in late-Victorian
Cambridge’, Echos du Monde Classique/Classical Views 42.3 (1998), 449-70.
‘Unseen university. Remembering and forgetting Cambridge’, Cambridge Review,
November 1998, 1-8.
Introductory essay, pp.1-20, in Winchester Notions: the English Dialect of Winchester
College (London: Athlone Press, 1998).
‘Contestation and change in Cambridge Classics, 1822-1914’, Dialogos 4 (1997), 1-16.
‘Thucydides or Grote? Classical disputes and disputed classics in 19th-century
Cambridge’, Transactions of the American Philological Association 127 (1997),
363-71.
‘John Taylor and Locke’s Classical System’, Paradigm 20 (1996), 26-38.
‘Primers, publishing and politics: the classical textbooks of Benjamin Hall Kennedy’,
Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 90.4 (1996), 451-74.
‘Scholars and gentlemen: towards a historical sociology of classical scholarship’, in
H. D. Jocelyn (ed), Aspects of Nineteenth-century British classical scholarship,
Liverpool Classical Monthly (Liverpool Classical Papers, no 5, 1996), 13-27.
‘Idiosyncrasy and idiolexis in Victorian public schools’, The Mushri-English
Pronouncing Dictionary. A Chapter in 19th- century Public-school Lexicography
(Berkeley/Swansea, privately printed, 1996, 2-36.
‘On first looking into Kennedy’s Latin Primer’, Grinders and Grammars: a
Victorian Controversy (The Textbook Colloquium, 1996), 7-12.
‘Digs and degrees: Jessie Crum’s tour of Greece, Easter 1901’, Classics Ireland 2
(1995),121-131.
‘Paradigms regained. Towards a historical sociology of textbooks’, Journal of
Curriculum Studies 26.1 (1994), 1-29.
‘Ideology and institution: English classical scholarship in transition’, in
Reinterpreting the Classics (special issue of Annals of Scholarship, vol 10.1, (ed.
C. A. Stray and R. A. Kaster), 111-131.
‘The smell of Latin grammar. Contrary imaginings in English classrooms’, Bulletin of
the John Rylands Library 76.3 (1994), 201-222.
‘Zulu and Zuleika’, The Book Collector 42.3 (1993), 429-31.
‘Locke’s system of classical instruction’, The Locke Newsletter 22 (1991), 115-21.
‘A cellarful of ghosts? the library of the Educational Division of the South
Kensington Museum’, Paradigm 3 (1990), 13-15.
‘Paradigms of social order: the politics of Latin grammar in 19th-century England’,
Bulletin of the Henry Sweet Society 13 (1989), 3-24.
‘England, culture and the 19th century’, Liverpool Classical Monthly 13.6 (1998),
85-90.
‘Culture or discipline? the redefinition of classical education’, in M.H. Price (ed) The
development of the secondary curriculum (Croom Helm, 1986), 10-48.
‘From monopoly to marginality: Classics in English education’, in I.F. Goodson (ed.)
Social Histories of the Secondary Curriculum (Falmer Press, 1985),19-52.