Research opportunities

In addition to our research centres the department collaborates widely with research networks, such as the Classical Reception studies network, Wellcome Society, Digital Classics and many others. We welcome expressions of interest in research from students and scholars.

Visiting Fellowships

The British Academy offers  Visiting Fellowships for early-career scholars from overseas working in any branch of the humanities or social sciences to apply, in conjunction with a UK host academic, to spend at least two months undertaking a clearly specified research project in the United Kingdom. The Department of Classics welcomes enquiries from overseas scholars who may wish to apply for this scheme. Please contact Phiroze Vasunia, Director of Research.

We can offer supervision on a very wide range of research topics, often working in co-operation with staff from other disciplines.

Current staff and their research interests are:

Emma Aston (Dr): Greek cult, especially extra-urban sanctuaries; monsters and fabulous creatures in Greek myth and religion; ancient attitudes towards the natural world. Currently working on the depiction of Greek deities as animal-human hybrids in the Classical and Hellenistic periods.

David Carter (Dr.): Greek literature, especially tragedy; political thought.

Timothy Duff (Dr.): the biographies of Plutarch, ancient historiography.

Barbara Goff (Prof.): Greek tragedy and its reception, women in antiquity, and literary theory.

Katherine Harloe (Dr):The reception of antiquity in European political thought and intellectual history from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries

Gill Knight (Dr.): Classical and Medieval letter writing and letter collections.

Peter Kruschwitz (Dr): Roman Republican literature (poetry in particular); Roman metre; Latin epigraphy (especially Republican inscriptions, metrical inscriptions, and the wall inscriptions of Pompeii and Herculaneum); Latin linguistics

Annalisa Marzano (Dr):Roman social and economic history, especially the roles of elite villas, aquaculture and technological transfer.  Annalisa also works on numismatics.

Matthew Nicholls (Dr):Roman material culture, architecture, cities, settlement, and monuments, and the way that emperors and other patrons made use of them.  Matthew focusses especially on libraries, how they functioned as both buildings and book collections, and also their wider role in disseminating imperial and local ideas of literary culture and political or social identity.

Ian Rutherford (Prof.): ancient Greek poetry, ancient Greek language and literature, pilgrimage in the ancient world.

Amy Smith (Dr.): ancient art, politics, myth, religion, and women in antiquity.

Phiroze Vasunia (Dr.) Greek literature, cross-cultural contact, and the histories of colonialism and Orientalism.