Current research
St Andrews has a distinguished record of research in classical subjects reaching back through the centuries. Our staff conduct research across the full range of the field.
Explore a selection of the current work ongoing in the school:
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Andrea Brock is continuing to process and publish the results of the Forum Boarium Project, a geoarchaeological coring survey of Rome’s central river valley. She aims to punch more holes in the streets of Rome in the near future. Additionally, she is co-editing (with Dr Ruben Post) the Routledge Handbook of Environmental Approaches to the Ancient World, which should appear in 2025 and is intended to serve as a touchstone for all those looking to learn more about ancient Mediterranean environmental studies. She is also actively researching applications of environmental history for responding to the modern climate crisis.
Anna Kelley is currently working on new theoretical approaches to premodern commodity histories through a project on the diffusion of cotton in the first millennium, as well as issues of gender, labour, and social capital in Late Antiquity. She is also editing volumes on the impact of mobility on production processes in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages and another on social hierarchies in the Byzantine Empire (with Flavia Vanni).
Rhyne King is in the process of publishing a monograph called The House of the Satrap and the Making of the Ancient Persian Empire. He is working on a co-authored book (with Wouter Henkelman) on the history of Kerman (southern Iran) in the first millennium BCE. He is writing articles on the Achaemenid institutional afterlife in the Indus river valley (with Divya Kumar-Dumas) and on the concept of treasure in the Achaemenid Empire.
Myles Lavan is working on a book-length, comparative study of manumission in the Roman world and the Americas; he is also finalising edited volumes on the Roman discourse of unrest and the history of the word Romanus, and collaborating on a project to model the distribution of wealth in the Roman empire.
Sian Lewis is writing a book, Zoa Politika: animals which live in the polis, which analyses the 'communal bestiaries' of Greek poleis around the Mediterranean. They are also working to establish a research network in ancient Mediterranean animal studies and developing a database of regional sources on animal history and archaeology.
Carlos Machado is working on a book project about the role of poverty in the making of the late antique West. He is also co-director, with Sebastian Schmidt-Hofner, of an AHRC-DFG funded project on land and politics in the later Roman world.
Brian Martens, a Greek archaeologist, has several current publication projects: a synthetic study of the results of excavations in Athenian Agora from 1980-2022, with John Camp; a monograph on Athenian marble-carving workshops from the Archaic period to Late Antiquity; and an on-going collaboration with the Ephorate of Antiquities of Preveza to publish sculptural assemblages from Nikopolis (Epiros).
Ruben Post is completing a monograph on the social, economic, and environmental history of the Achaian League. He is collaborating with an interdisciplinary team to study the climatic and societal impacts in the Mediterranean of a large volcanic eruption of c. 426 BC. He is also co-editing a handbook on ancient environmental approaches to the ancient Mediterranean (with Andrea Brock).
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Alex Long is completing a book on nature, action and practical reason in Plato. He is editing a volume with his St Andrews colleague Michael Carroll on Greek literature and philosophy and another volume with Barbara Sattler (Bochum) on the early philosopher Parmenides. He is also working on Cicero's De legibus and Stoic natural law theory.
Other experts on ancient philosophy are based in the Schools of Philosophy and Divinity.
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Emma Buckley is working on a monograph project examining the absorption and transformation of ancient literature in early modern Neo-Latin and vernacular drama, 1581-1603. She is also collaborating, as part of the Flavian Research Network, on a series of conferences and publications on the age of Domitian, and she co-chairs (with Henry Stead) the St Andrews Centre for Receptions of Antiquity. She is currently co-supervising doctoral projects on Flavian epic, fog in antiquity, and the Furies, and welcomes students interested in early imperial literature and Classical Reception, especially of the early modern period.
Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis is editing a volume on Travel and Classical Antiquities in Ottoman Greece C18th-C19th (BSA Routledge), and she is working on a monograph on the merchant collector Thomas Burgon (1787-1856) and his family. In relation to the ancient world itself she is writing up a conference paper entitled ‘Bodies, landscape and entanglement in imperial Attica’, and continuing work on Inclusive Classics.
Henry Stead is working on a monograph associated with his Brave New Classics project called Red Antiquity which investigates the collision of 20th century British communism with classical antiquity until 1956. He is also collaborating with colleagues in Prague, Warsaw and Ljubljana on Cold War classics. He is director of the Latin outreach scheme, STALOS, and co-director of SACRA.
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Michael Carroll is finishing a monograph on metaphor in Aeschylus that draws on cognitive linguistics. He is also working on a series of articles on the poetic persona in Pindar’s victory odes (again with the help of cognitive linguistics), and is doing the preliminary research for a project on the theatrical imagination in ancient Greek drama.
Jon Hesk is currently writing a book on the significance of ancient Greek writing about decision-making and deliberation. Smaller-scale current projects include: the use of framing and ‘folk cognitive psychology’ in Demosthenes’ deliberative speeches; the role of anger in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and its reception; the playwright Zinnie Harris’ engagement with Aeschylus’ Oresteia.
Jason König is working on a series of publications on representations of landscape and human-environment relations in antiquity, especially in imperial and late antique Greek literature, including a book on ancient representations of the earth and the surfaces of the earth. He also has ongoing projects on Alciphron’s Letters, and on classical reception in nineteenth-century travel and mountaineering writing.
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Thomas (Tom) Biggs is currently writing a book on Plautus’ Poenulus. He is also co-editing two volumes. The first, with Mathilde Cazeaux (ENS Lyon), explores Rome and Numidia. The second, with Katherine Wasdin (Maryland), is focused on the Mater Magna. Tom has just published an article in Classical Philology on fragments and intertextuality, and will soon return to working on a commentary for Book 6 of Silius Italicus’ Punica.
Emma Buckley is working on a monograph project examining the absorption and transformation of ancient literature in early modern Neo-Latin and vernacular drama, 1581-1603. She is also collaborating, as part of the Flavian Research Network, on a series of conferences and publications on the age of Domitian.
Talitha Kearey is working on a book on ancient biographies of Virgil. She is also co-editing a volume on collaboration in Greek and Roman literature (with Max Leventhal and Thomas J. Nelson), and writing chapters on queer philologies in 1st century CE Rome, on pastoral metalepsis, and on Roman emperors’ literary production.
Alice König co-directs the Visualising War and Peace project with Nicolas Wiater. Combining Humanities and Social Science methods, she studies the evolution of discourses of war and peace from antiquity to the present day, paying attention not only to different habits of imagining and representing conflict but also to the ‘feedback loop’ between narrative and reality – i.e. the impact which war-storytelling has on how we think, feel and behave. Her current research draws on previous publications on ancient intertextuality and intermediality, and on ancient intellectual history, particularly the science of warfare.
Roger Rees is currently co-writing, with Jan Willem Drijvers (Groningen), a commentary on Panegyrici Latini XII(9), a Latin speech delivered by a Gallic orator to the emperor Constantine in Trier in the summer of 313CE. Perhaps most famously, the speech contains the earliest account we have of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. Drijvers and Rees plan to finish the book in 2024.