Skip to main content

Events

Events

The Centre for Oratory and Rhetoric regularly organises, supports and hosts talks, workshops, and other events. Find out what's coming up and how to book. To make sure you are up to date with events, follow us on Twitter: @COR_RHUL and @ClassicsRHUL.

We are pleased to announce an online lecture series on Greek and Roman oratory and rhetoric, titled ‘Building Bridges: Exploring Graeco-Roman Oratory and Rhetoric from a Cross-cultural Perspective’, which will run from October 2025 to July 2026. The series aims to bridge classical traditions and contemporary scholarship, providing a platform for scholars and students to engage in both intellectual exchange and pedagogical dialogue. The series has two main objectives: to foster academic collaboration by exploring emerging areas in rhetorical studies, and to enhance pedagogy by equipping students with critical tools for rhetorical and oratorical analysis. The series is open to all, and especially welcomes graduate students and early-career researchers. 

Lectures will take place on Fridays at 09:00 UTC (09:00 GMT, 10:00 BST, 11:00 CEST, 17:00 Beijing, 18:00 Seoul/Tokyo) via Zoom (link available here) 

Please note that the first lecture session on 17 October 2025 will begin at 10:00 am (British Summer Time, GMT+1); subsequent lectures, from 14 November to 27 March 2026, will begin at 9:00 am (GMT), unless otherwise noted in the programme.   

The full programme of the series is available here  

Some of our events have included an international conference jointly organised by Professor Noboru Sato (Kobe, Japan) in collaboration with COR on character projection in classical oratory (March 2021). Other COR events have included research workshops on ‘Legal Advocacy, Gender and Emotion' in association with the The Bedford Centre for the History of Women and Gender and the Centre for the Study of Law and Emotion, as well as a workshop on ‘Law and Advocacy: Ancient and Modern’.

Far and away our most successful events have been part of our ‘Rhetorical Get Togethers’ seminar series. Organised by COR and the International Society for the History of Rhetoric (ISHR), Rhetorical Get Togethers 1.0 ran between June-July 2021 and featured papers delivered by leading international experts. In Get Together 2.0, COR and ISHR hosted fantastic papers on a range of fascinating subjects each week between February-April 2022. Themes included everything from the early works of Demosthenes (Kraus, Tübingen – 17th Feb), to rhetorical education in Graeco-Roman Egypt (Dainville, Oxford/Bruxelles – 24th Feb), and strategies of forgetting in Cicero’s speeches (Schulz, Eichstätt-Ingolstadt – 10th Mar). Get Togethers 3.0 meanwhile focussed on Rhetorical representations of war and atrocities in deliberative and forensic oratory and in speeches in Graeco-Roman historiography.

Explore Royal Holloway