Academies under Stress: the Reinvention and Survival of Platonist Schools, 360BC-AD565

Researchers: Professor Harold Tarrant; Dr DC Baltzly; A/Prof EE Benitez; Prof F Renaud; Dr JS Rocca

Australian Research Council Discovery Grant, 2009-2011, $211 514

This project promises new insights into the versatility that is required for an intellectual movement to fend off social, political, religious, and intellectual pressures, preserving whatever is thought central to its mission, and responding positively to the needs and demands of successive eras. Though grounded in antiquity, and involving a Greek movement's response to successive Macedonian, Roman, and Christian pressures, or to other pressures of a social, political, scientific, and religious nature, modern analogies will be instructive. In particular it should offer lessons both for higher educational bodies and for minority intellectual or religious movements responding to mono-cultural pressures that regularly arise.