Felix Budelmann is Professor of Classics at the University of Groningen. Prior to that, he held positions at Manchester (1998-2001), the Open University (2003-2008) and Oxford (2008-2021). He works on Greek literature, and has a particular interest in the cognitive humanities.
Ineke Sluiter FBA, PhD Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (1990) has been Professor of Greek at Leiden University since 1998. She works on ancient ideas on language (grammar, rhetoric, literary criticism), cognitive approaches to ancient literature, 'anchoring innovation' in the ancient world, and the relevance of the Humanities in the modern world. She is the recipient of a 2010 Spinoza Award, and was Vice-President and then President of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences from 2018-2022. She is a member of the Academia Europaea.

• 1: Felix Budelmann: Introduction


• Part I Reading Minds


• 2: Evert van Emde Boas: Mindreading, character, and realism: the case of Medea


• 3: Sheila Murnaghan: Reading the mind of Ajax


• 4: Michael Carroll: Space for deliberation: image schemas, metaphorical reasoning, and the dilemma of Pelasgus


• Part II Cognitive Work by Characters


• 5: Ruth Scodel: Attribution and Antigone


• 6: Lucy van Essen Fishman: 'Remember to what sort of man you give this favour': Looking back on Sophocles' Ajax


• 7: Anne-Sophie Noel: Thinking through things: extended cognition as a consolatory fiction in Greek tragedy


• Part III Performance, Spectating, and Cognition


• 8: Hanna Golab: Spectating ancient dramas: the Athenian audience and its emotional response


• 9: Jonas Grethlein: Gorgias' apatê, Sophocles' Electra, and cognitive criticism


• 10: A. C. Duncan: Seeing together: joint attention in Attic tragedy


• 11: Seth L. Schein: Generic expectations and the interpretation of Attic tragedy some preliminary questions and considerations


• 12: Bob Corthals and Ineke Sluiter: Situated cognition. Sophocles, Milgram, and the disobedient hero

Minds on Stage expands our understanding of Greek tragedy, and uses Greek tragedy as a way to explore cognitive thinking. We see both 'minds on stage', understanding and dealing with complex situations and with each other, and 'minds in the audience', following the action, forming a picture of the characters' inner worlds.