Biography
I am Associate Professor of Classical Reception at the Faculty of Classics and Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama. Before joining Oxford, I held various positions as member of the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Bristol (2002-24) and as Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Wolfson College Oxford and Research Fellow at the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (1999-2002). I studied at the University of Cambridge (PhD 1998), UCL (MA 1994) and Crete (BA 1993).
I have been Editor-in-Chief of the Classical Receptions Journal (2020-23) and member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of the Classical Tradition, the Journal of Greek Media & Culture, and the Bloomsbury series Classical Receptions in Twentieth-Century Writing. I am also Honorary President of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies. I have held grants by the British Academy, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the A. G. Leventis Foundation as well as Research/Visiting Fellowships at the University of Bonn, the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies at Princeton University, the Free University in Berlin.
I have also undertaken an extensive programme of public engagement activities in the UK, Europe, and North America, including screenings of archival films with live musical accompaniment, introductory talks, and Q&A sessions, in collaboration with academics from other Universities, artists, museums and other institutions such as the British Museum, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the German History Museum, the BFI National Film Archive, the EYE Film Museum of Amsterdam, the French and British Schools at Athens, and the Society for Classical Studies.
Research Interests
My research interests are in ancient Greek culture, literature and theatre, and in their reception in antiquity and in the modern world.
I have published on Greek tragedy, performance history, classical reception, film, and media theory/history. Among my publications are four monographs: Encounters with the Plague in Homer, Sophocles and Euripides (forthcoming 2025, for a taster see here), Greek Tragedy on Screen (Oxford University Press, 2013), Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis (Duckworth, 2006), and Achilles in Greek Tragedy (Cambridge University Press, 2002; reissued 2007). I have also edited or coedited four volumes of essays: Classics and Media Theory (Oxford University Press, 2020) The Ancient World in Silent Cinema (Cambridge University Press, 2013; with Maria Wyke), Agamemnon in Performance, 458 BC to AD 2004 (Oxford University Press, 2005; with Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh and Oliver Taplin), and Homer, Tragedy and Beyond: essays in honour of P.E. Easterling (SPHS, 2001; with Felix Budelmann).
I am at present writing a monograph on the encounter between ancient Greece and early cinema at the turn of the twentieth century and on the wider implications of that encounter for classical antiquity and the culture of modernity (a chapter can be found here). I am also currently working on articles on classics and media theory/history, on classics and cinema in the digital age, on the performance history of Greco-Roman drama and on Greek aesthetics and literary theory.
Research Supervision
I would be interested in taking on postgraduate students with research interests in any aspect of classical reception; archaic and classical Greek literature; Greek tragedy and comedy; Greece, Rome, and cultural transmission; classics and the performing arts; classics and film/TV; classics and old/new media; digital humanities. Current/recent research topics supervised: Crete in archaic Greek literature and thought; the concept of the future in Greek tragedy; hatred in early Greek literature; miasma in Greek tragedy and its reception; queer theory and gender ambiguity in Greece and Rome; performativity and classical antiquity in performance in the Edwardian era; African adaptations of Greek tragedy; Ancient Greece in computer games; Greece and Rome in science fiction.
Positions
- Fellow in Classical Reception
Subjects
- Classics
