Staff Profile:Dr Emma Aston

Name:

Dr Emma Aston

Job Title:

Lecturer

Responsibilities:

Lecturer in Ancient History; Departmental Director of Teaching and Learning

Member of the Council of the British School at Athens

Areas of Interest:

I have previously worked chiefly within the area of ancient religion, and my monograph on Greek animal hybrid deities is currently being prepared for publication. My new project, however, is on the history and culture of Thessaly in the Classical and Hellenistic periods, and reflects a growing conviction that things get really interesting north of Thermopylai! I have spent a term as a Fellow of the British School at Athens working on research for a book on this topic and have also travelled extensively in the area. With its rich and much-exploited plains, Thessaly also allows me to work further on another long-standing area of interest: the Greeks' relationship with the natural world, both actual (through agriculture and animal husbandry) and imaginary (through myth).

Research groups / Centres:

Publications:

Mixanthrôpoi: Animal-Human Hybrid Deities in Greek Religion. Liège: Centre International d'Étude de la Religion Grecque Antique. At press.

'Thetis and Cheiron in Thessaly', Kernos 22 (2009), 83 - 107

'Hybrid Statues in Ancient Greece: Animal, Human, God', in A. Alexandridis, M. Wild and L. Winkler-Horacek eds., Mensch und Tier in der Antike: Grenzziehung und Grenzuberschreitung, Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2008

'The Absence of Chiron', Classical Quarterly 56 (2006), 349 - 362

'Asclepius and the Legacy of Thessaly', Classical Quarterly 54 (2004), 18 - 32

 Selected conference papers:

'Thessaly and Delphi.' To be given at the research seminar of the Department of Classics and Ancient History, University of Manchester, November 2010.

'Thetis and the immortalisation of Achilles', to be given at the conference What's in a Variant? at the University of Bristol, January 2010

'Was there a cult of Thetis in Thessaly?', given at the meeting of the Oxford Philological Society, 7th November 2008

'Centaurs and Tribal Displacement', given at the conference Where the Wild Things Are: Inhuman Territories in Classical Antiquity at the University of Reading, September 2008 (organised by myself and a colleague)

'What did the Greeks think about their animal-hybrid gods?', given at the UK Ancient Historians Annual Meeting, Birmingham, May 2008

'White and Black in the Thessalian Cult of Thetis', given at the Classics Research Seminar, University of Reading, January 2008