1st Annual Meeting of Postgraduates in Ancient Philosophy (AMPAPhil): Report (by David Preston)

On Saturday 25th of June, 2016, the 1st Annual Meeting of Postgraduates in Ancient Philosophy took place in rooms 349, 243 & 246 of Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU, and was co-organized by myself and my fellow Classics Ph.D. candidate Miss. Emma Ramsey. For a number of years postgraduate conferences such as AMPAL, AMPAH and AMPRAW have been running successfully and have provided an opportunity for the worldwide postgraduate community to interact and share research in their respective areas; we envisioned AMPAPhil to establish a similar tradition for those postgraduates engaged in research on any area of Ancient Philosophy. We decided the theme would be 'Philosophy and Society' in the hope that such a topic would invite speakers to fit their often obscure research into this more accessible bracket. We were blessed with much assistance from the outset; a generous grant from the Institute of Classical Studies - who had already provided us with rooms in which we could hold parallel sessions and refreshment breaks - offered us a £500 bursary to tempt a well-known keynote speaker into joining us. This allowed us to secure John Dillon, a renowned Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin, who would give an electrifying closing speech. Royal Holloway's own Prof. Anne Sheppard also kindly agreed to be our second keynote, who opened the conference with a stimulating lecture on the place of drama in a Neo-Platonist society.

With our keynotes and venue established, we sent out our call for papers. The reason we received such a good response, however, is mostly due to us being awarded the Ethel Beatrice, as we planned to use the award to contribute towards our speakers' travel and accommodation expenses and so had mentioned that travel bursaries were available for those who were coming from a long distance. This proved to be a huge incentive in attracting the quality of speakers we had; finances are limited for the majority of Ph.D. students, and so many of our speakers (especially those from the continent) would simply not have been able to afford to join us had we not been able to provide them with some financial assistance in getting here. The Ethel Beatrice Award aims to promote research in the study of Greek culture, so we could offer bursaries to those whose research concerned the Greek philosophers. We had 19 speakers in total, including our keynotes, 8 of whom came from outside the UK and Ireland, and although the Ethel Beatrice award has been traditionally been used to assist the recipient in travelling to engage with their research subject abroad, we saw this as a novel opportunity to bring those with whom we would be endeavouring to meet abroad to London. Rather than use the bursary to further our research in one particular country, the Ethel Beatrice award offered us the chance to bring the best young scholars in our field from a variety of countries under one roof, where we could share our research with each other in a symposiatic environment. This would not have been possible had we not the option to offer to pay for some of our speakers' expenses; it would have been taken for granted that they would not receive a fee for speaking at a postgraduate conference, and so many of our speakers - who in any other circumstances would have gladly made the journey - would simply have had to decline out of fiscal necessity.

The fruits of our labours - and the benefit the Ethel Beatrice award allowed - will not go unnoticed; we are publishing the proceedings of the conference in Auctor - the Classics Department's new peer-reviewed online journal. As with many of these annual meetings of postgraduates in a particular subject, we hope to 'pass the torch' on to our colleagues in the hope that they will continue the tradition and host the next meeting at their university (as has been the case with AMPAL, AMPRAW and AMPAH), and are delighted to have received interest in doing so from many of our attendees. The first AMPAPhil, however, will always have been the product of Royal Holloway.