Classics Society Dinner
Talk, Reception, and Dinner
6.00pm, Saturday 24 January 2026
The New College Classics Society invites you, and a guest, to its annual reception and dinner.
The evening will begin with a pre-dinner talk at 6.00pm in the McGregor Matthews room, followed by a drinks reception at 6.45pm in the Founder’s Library and a three-course dinner in Hall at 7.15pm.
The Society are delighted to confirm that the guest speaker will be Dr Charlotte Spence, Lecturer in Ancient History at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. Dr Spence will speak on “Cursing and Being Cursed in Late Antique Egypt”.
This dinner is one of the main times in the year when students have the opportunity to meet and talk with Old Members, to share their experiences of Classics at New College.
Dress code is lounge suits or equivalent.
The cost of the dinner is £80.00 per person. You can book your place securely via the University of Oxford online payment facility. As part of the checkout process there will be an opportunity to let us know if you have any special dietary requirements or allergens, mobility issues, and also to request a parking space, if needed.
**There is a special discounted rate for New College Old Members who graduated within the last two years (2024 and 2025). Those eligible will pay £60.00 per person. If this applies to you please email oldmembers@new.ox.ac.uk and we will send a link to enable you to pay the reduced rate.
Please RSVP by Wednesday 14 January 2025 to confirm your place.
About the speaker:
After reading for her BA degree in Ancient History at the University of Birmingham and completing a PhD at the University of Exeter, Dr Charlotte Spence was lucky enough to secure her first academic job at New College. This year she is a lecturer at St Hilda's College. Charlotte's teaching interests reflect the chronological breadth of her research; she teaches topics from Archaic Greek History through to the reign of Emperor Hadrian. She is a social and cultural historian and is particularly interested in weaving material culture into her teaching.
Charlotte's current research continues to build on her PhD, which examined the conceptions of the dead and the divine in ancient curse tablets. Her first monograph, Appeals to the Supernatural in Ancient Curse Tablets, is due to be published by Bloomsbury Academic next year. She has previously published on the development of Roman curse tablets, ancient Greek personal religion, and cursing in Carthage. She is currently working on her next monograph, which focuses on the use of Jewish and Christian powers in curse tablets in Late Antiquity.
Thank you for your support
Whether or not you are able to attend the dinner, contributions to the New College Classics Society would be greatly appreciated and will be used to help subsidise the cost of the dinner for students, to cover the expenses for guest speakers invited by the Society and help to subsidise the annual New College Classics reading trip to Euboea for those that would otherwise not be able to participate. We greatly appreciate any support you can offer and, if you wish to make a gift, please complete the donation form.
We are extremely grateful to those Old Members who currently contribute; thank you for your continued support.
Kind regards,
William Brown
President of the New College Classics Society
© Photograph by Laura Smith
