Classics Postgraduate Research

Sam Agbamu, Lecturer, University of Reading

Roman Africa in Imperial Italy’s cultural imaginary, 1911-1943

2019

This thesis looks at the relationship between Roman Africa in the Italian cultural imaginary, and Italy’s project of nation-building and modernisation. I focus on non-academic sources, since these, I argue, represent ideas of Roman Africa in the Italian imperial imaginary at their most pervasive and widespread, and are most suited to transforming discourses of Roman Africa into imperial realities. Films, monuments, popular publications, and public ceremonies propagated the ‘invented tradition’ of romanità, forging a modern, national, and imperial identity by appealing to antiquity.

Restorations of Empire in Africa: Ancient Rome and Modern Italy's African Colonies (Oxford University Press 2024)

Edward Creedy, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Theology, Durham

‘To Open the Eyes of the Blind’ The Spectacle and Performance of Salvation in Clement of Alexandria’s Protrepticus

2024

Writing at the close of the second century, the early Christian author Clement of Alexandria offered an innovative presentation of his Christian gospel in his exhortatory Protrepticus. Clement framed his appeal to faith in the Divine Logos of Jesus Christ within a fundamentally performative framework. Couched in the poetry, drama and mythology of the Greco-Roman world to which he wrote, Clement presented Christ on stage – performing rightly in the place of a fallen humanity. This dramatic framing was an innovation previously unseen in Early Christian literature, and offered the reader not only an introduction to the Christian faith, but to Clement’s Christian philosophy more broadly. This thesis explored Clement’s innovative presentation of this divine drama, and the impact it has on converting his reader first into audience member, and then into Christian believer. The Protrepticus is the first in a trilogy of major works – followed by the Paedagogus and the Stromateis. Whilst the latter two texts have commanded the majority of scholarly attention devoted to Clement, this thesis addressed that imbalance, and explored how a right understanding of this first major work unlocks Clement’s entire intellectual project.

‘Rethinking Clement’s Euripides: An Alexandrian Tragedy’, CQ (2025, forthcoming).

Karl Dahm, Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow, Department of Classics and Ancient History, Durham University

(Re)Writing the History of a Christian Roman Empire. A Study on Conflict and Authority in Socrates of Constantinople's and Sozomen of Gaza's Ecclesiastical Histories

2022

My thesis offers a close literary reading of Socrates’ and Sozomen’s Ecclesiastical Histories. While a huge amount of what we know about the fourth and fifth centuries CE comes from the pages of their works, hardly any attention has been paid to why they wrote – and how those contemporary projects shaped their and our picture of the past. Influenced by recent studies on intertextuality, my thesis reveals how traumatic pasts were modelled in agreement with the conflicting identities of marginalised religious communities and their complicated relationship with the imperial centre. The new understanding of the literary construction of Socrates’ and Sozomen’s histories, which my thesis offers, has wide-reaching consequences for modern scholarship of this period.

‘Commotion, Rebellion, and War. Eusebius of Caesarea’s Narrative of Jewish Violence Against Roman Rule in His Ecclesiastical History’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 29.4 (2021) 495–523.

Sara De Martin,

Theognis Out of the Symposium: Studies in the Ancient Reception of the Theognidea

2021

‘Theognis Out of the Symposium’ explores how the elegiac poetry ascribed to the Greek poet Theognis of Megara was received by classical, Hellenistic and imperial Greek authors. The thesis is primarily concerned with the reception of the Theognidea as 1) an exponent of a particular tradition, that of paraenetic discourse, and 2) an epitome of socio-intellectual exclusivist self-positioning. Accordingly, the study starts by looking at how the Theognidea place themselves in the tradition of paraenesis, namely how they are in dialogue with earlier and contemporary texts. It then turns to consider Theognidean elegy as an intertext for later texts. Overall, the thesis aims at both a re-assessment of the often-acknowledged didactic and gnomic character of Theognis’ poetry, and at an overarching illustration of how Theognis’ lines and persona are conceived of, received and repurposed throughout antiquity, from classical to imperial times.

Wisdom in the Empire: Gender, Authority, Performance (WisE-GAP)

The WisE-GAP project will initiate the study of the ‘gender gap’ in the discourse of moral authority in ancient Greek and Roman literature dated to imperial times (1st-3rd c. CE). It will focus on maxims, mobilising them as fundamental rhetorical devices for the construction of gender. I will highlight how maxims were thought to be differently useful to men, women and children, how they were deployed by male authors to create gendered personae and project moral authority, and I will deconstruct ‘female’ moral voices, studying their form, contents and uses in context.

October 2024-: Post-doc, Université de Lille (funded with a Leverhulme Trust ‘Study Abroad Studentship’); Non-stipendiary Research Fellow, Institute of Classical Studies, London

October 2023-September 2024: Early Career Research Associate, Institute of Classical Studies, London

October 2022-September 2024: Lecturer in Classical Languages and Greek Literature, Regent’s Park College, Oxford

‘Theognidean Misconduct: Representing the (Un)traditional in Pherecrates' Chiron’, GRBS 62 (2022) 161–181.

Giacomo Fedeli, Lecturer in Classics & Ancient History, University of Exeter

Ancient perspectives on literary history: Horace as a literary historian

2017

My dissertation proposed a rehabilitation of the study of ancient perspectives on the literary past as a useful critical tool to investigate various aspects of the Greek and Roman world (not necessarily related to literature). The first half of my work focused on a few case studies from and about ancient scholarship, while the second half considered the perspective of a single poet, Horace, with particular attention to his Satires and Epistles.

Bruno Lloret Fuentes

Brown Athenas: Hispano-American philhellenisms and the invention of the future

2024

This dissertation examines Philhellenism in Latin America between the 1880s and the 1940s. It studies its conditions of emergence through fin-de-siècle modernists, and the way their successors, during the first half of the twentieth century, engaged with ancient Greece and Athens as historical realities, cultural exempla, as well as images for projecting a future for their nations and the region. It focuses mainly, although not solely, on the works of José Martí (1853-1895), Rubén Darío (1867-1916), José Enrique Rodó (1871-1917), Jesús Urueta (1867-1920), Leopoldo Lugones (1874-1938), Pedro Henríquez Ureña (1884-1946), José Vasconcelos (1882-1959) and Alfonso Reyes (1889-1959). Its main aim is to describe an intellectual, cultural, phenomenon, not yet systemized at this scale, in order to understand to what extent the primacy of Homer and Athens in the personal imaginaries of artists and intellectuals defines discourses of culture, knowledge, identity, and politics in the region. It unveils the centrality of ancient Greece in discussions of antiquity and modernity, history and pre-history, past and future, civilization and barbarism across the region in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries.

Carl Mauzy, Lecturer at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

Partial exposures – Photography and the formation of Greek national identity

2022

Photography and the modern nation of Greece were invented almost concurrently, in the 1830s. Ever since, photography has visualised the unfolding historical developments of the modern Greek nation, mediating and narrativizing Greek history as well as Greek national identity. The thesis explores how Greek collective identities and their close companion, memory, have been mediated and imagined through Greek photography. Thus, the thesis’ main research question is what types of collective identities have been imagined through Greek photography in the twentieth century. A related question is what part do modern Greek photographic archives play in Greek national identity creation, dissemination, and retention.

‘Second World War Amateur Soldier Photographs as Witnesses and Heritage’, in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Cultural Heritage and Conflict, edited by Ihab Saloul and Britt Baillie (forthcoming).

Francesca Modini, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, University of Warwick

Lyric and the Second Sophistic: The case of Aelius Aristides

2019

This is the first study of the persistence and significance of ancient lyric in imperial Greek culture. Re-defining lyric reception as a phenomenon ranging from textual engagement with ancient poems to the appropriation of song traditions, this analysis counters the picture of imperial culture (paideia) as centred on Homer and Attic literature. It argues that textual knowledge of lyric allowed imperial writers to show a more sophisticated level of paideia. But it also reveals how lyric traditions mobilised distinctive discourses of self-fashioning, local identity, and power crucial for Greeks under Rome. This is most evident in the works of Aelius Aristides, who reconfigured ancient lyric to shape his persona and enhance his speeches to diverse imperial communities. Besides re-evaluating ancient lyric reception and imperial culture, exploring Aristides’ lyric poetics changes how we interpret his re-construction of the classical tradition and his involvement in the complex politics of the Empire.

Aelius Aristides and the Poetics of Lyric in Imperial Greek Culture, Greek Culture in the Roman World series, CUP (in press)

Ferdinand Saumarez Smith, Director, Factum Foundation London

Eleusis and Enlightenment: The Problem of the Mysteries in Eighteenth-Century Thought

2022

The age of Enlightenment – the so-called age of reason – was also, paradoxically, the age of the Eleusinian mysteries. By attempting to reveal Demeter's secret cult, British, French, and German thinkers and freemasons of the eighteenth century revealed more than they bargained for: the pagan origins of Christian doctrines such as the Trinity and the afterlife, and through the mythical gift of law and agriculture to Eleusis an alternative narrative of the origins of civilisation to that found in the Bible.

Eleusis and Enlightenment: The Problem of the Mysteries in Eighteenth-Century Thought (Brill 2024)

Federica Scicolone, Research Fellow in Classics, Scuola Superiore Meridionale, Naples

The Language of Objects: Deictic Techniques in Descriptive Greek Epigrams

2018

By its nature Greek epigram continuously attempts to bridge the gap between text and reading context. In light of this, material culture provides evidence of short poetic texts that ‘talk’ about the objects to which they are attached and variously interact with their monumental supports. This work is concerned with a selection of descriptive epigrams in literary and inscriptional form, whose deictic language reflects three different approaches to the texts’ extra-linguistic contexts (imagination-oriented deixis, ocular deixis and displaced deixis). The examined texts cover a wide chronological range, from the pre-Hellenistic to the Late Antique period, to highlight the different strategies for construing the epigrams’ monumental contexts as they emerge in Greek epigrammatic practice over time. This work therefore deals, on the one hand, with descriptive epigrams selected from the Greek Anthology, and on the other hand, with funerary, dedicatory and honorific verse-inscriptions mainly from Asia Minor, Greece and Italy, which accompany the artefacts to which they refer (e.g. votive offerings, funerary monuments, wall paintings and graffiti, bath complexes). Through an interdisciplinary approach, this work explores how different deictics reflect the various ways in which ancient audiences construed the materiality of texts.

Stanley J. Seeger Visiting Research Fellow, Princeton University (spring 2024)

Research Fellow in Classics, University of Pavia (2022 – 2023)

Postdoctoral Researcher in Classics, University of Cyprus (2019 – 2022)

The Language of Objects: Deixis in Descriptive Greek Epigrams (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2024, https://brill.com/display/title/64817)

Peter Swallow, Member of Parliament for Bracknell

The reception of Aristophanes in Britain during the long-nineteenth century

2020

In this lively and wide-ranging study, Peter Swallow explores the reception of Aristophanes in Britain throughout the long-nineteenth century, setting it in the broader context of Victorian Classicism and, more specifically, the period's reception of Greek tragedy. Swallow shows the surprising extent to which Aristophanes was repurposed across an array of mediums in Victorian Britain, and demonstrates that Aristophanic reception in the period was always a process of speaking to contemporary issues--making Old Comedy new.

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Durham University (2023-2024)

Tassos and Angele Nomikos Postdoctoral Research Associate, Centre for Hellenic Studies, KCL (2021-2023)

Aristophanes in Britain (OUP 2023)

Gang Wu, Assistant Professor, Fudan University, China

Women in Central Greece, 1000-1200: Economic Activities, Devotional Life, Family

2020

The dissertation examines women in Byzantine Central Greece between 1000-1200. It aims to achieve two goals. Firstly, while the current scholarship on Byzantine women focuses on Constantinopolitan sources and underestimates regional differences, this study attempts to evaluate how patterns extracted from a specific provincial region may complement or revise our present knowledge. Secondly, taking the subject as an example, the study seeks to explore the potential of studying under-represented medieval social groups that appear invisible at first glance. The dissertation’s three main parts respectively examine women in their three primary areas of activity, i.e., economic involvement, devotional life, and family roles.

‘Mapping Byzantine Sericulture in the Global Transfer of Technology’, Journal of Global History 19 (2024) 1-17 (doi: 10.1017/S1740022823000050)

https://history.fudan.edu.cn/info/3271/15761.htm

Chen Xiong, Lecturer, School of History, Capital Normal University, Beijing, China

The Development of the Concept of ‘Empire’ at Rome into the Augustan Age

2020

‘Empire’ has always been one of the key concepts in human history. Most scholars blithely talk about the growth of the Roman ‘empire’ as if it were self-evident what the term means. The principal aim of this thesis is to clarify when and how, through the main phase of overseas expansion from around 200 BC into the Augustan age, the Romans began to conceive of their rule over other states and peoples as something we can recognize as an ‘empire’. The evidence studied consists primarily of statements about Roman rule in the extant literary sources of the period, both in Latin and Greek, with some comparative use of later writers, and epigraphic and numismatic sources as appropriate. I discuss developments in the meaning and use of key terms such as imperium, provincia, amicitia and pax. I show that mid-Republican sources tend to see Roman rule as a web encompassing various power relationships under vague terms such as amicitia, while from Cicero to Augustus there emerged a territorial concept of ‘empire’. I argue that Augustus himself, largely reflected in the literature of his age, presented Roman rule as a core of directly ruled and taxed ‘provinces’ and a vague periphery controlled by threats or amicitia, which set the norm for the Principate.

(in English) ‘Augustus’ presentation of “empire” in his Res Gestae’，Humanitas 78 (2021.12) 51-70.

(in Chinese) ‘The rise and development of Roman “Imperialism” in 19^th -century western academia’, World History (2021.02) 122-134 <19世纪罗马“帝国主义”问题在西方学术界的缘起与发展>.