This session offers a practical engagement with the compositional logic of the cento. Participants will work with a prepared corpus of lines from a single poet, applying the technique’s defining constraint: no alteration of the individual verses, only their order. The exercise will be an opportunity to try composing a cento and to observe how new meanings may emerge through the reconfiguration of inherited text.
Sigrid Schottenius Cullhed's Biography:
Cullhed is an associate professor and senior lecturer in literary studies at Uppsala University. In spring 2025, she was a visiting scholar at the Oxford Centre for Late Antiquity, funded by an RJ Sabbatical, working on a book about Proba. She currently serves as chair of the board for the Centre for Medical Humanities, as well as being a management team member of the research centre WOMHER, and, since 2024, a member of the management group of the Young Academy of Sweden.
You can read more on her Uppsala University website
The game session will be accompanied by a lecture on the cento