Prof Alice König

Prof Alice König

Director of Impact

Professor

Researcher profile

Phone
+44 (0)1334 46 2607
Email
arw6@st-andrews.ac.uk
Office
S18
Location
Swallowgate

 

Biography

Alice König graduated from King's College, Cambridge with a BA Hons (First Class) in Classics in 1999. She then studied for an MPhil degree at King's College, Cambridge, and for a PhD at St John's College, Cambridge. She arrived in St Andrews to take up a temporary lectureship in Classics in 2003, and was successful in securing a permanent post as Lecturer in Latin in 2005.

Teaching

Alice teaches at all levels of undergraduate and postgraduate study, specialising in the literature and culture of the Roman Empire and Peace and Conflict Studies. Honours modules include Roman Civil War Writing, Visualising War and Peace in Antiquity, and 'Classics for the Modern World: Interventions and Applications', an innovative 'living labs' module which invites students to research ways in which the study of Classics might help address pressing modern issues. She has also developed a VIP (Vertically Integrated Project) on Visualising Peace. She particularly welcomes doctoral students interested in Nervan/Trajanic/Hadrianic literature, intertextuality/literary interactions, technical writing, ancient intellectual history, war stories/Visualising War, ancient peace studies, and 'Applied Classics'/citizen scholarship/the dialogue between academia and activism.

Research areas

Alice's research falls into three distinct areas: intellectual history/the history of science; intertextual, socio-literary and cross-cultural interactions; ancient and modern narratives/discourses of war and peace.

In the past, she has focused on the social construction of expertise in ancient and modern cultures. She has published on a range of ancient ‘technical’ treatises, focusing particularly on the author and statesman, Sextus Julius Frontinus. His surviving treatises on Roman land surveying, Rome’s aqueduct network and military tactics shed important light on the currency, presentation and functioning of different kinds of knowledge in the Roman world. They also offer a valuable opportunity for us to re-examine ancient attitudes to what we today call ‘technical’ writing. In fact, her study of Frontinus’ works and their socio-political context questions traditional scholarly assumptions about genre, reading habits and the very definition of ‘literature’ itself.  

Alice's work on Frontinus has led to her wider study of Flavian, Nervan, Trajanic and Hadrianic literature. In particular, she directed a ground-breaking research project looking at literary and cultural interactions in the first and second centuries CE. Begun in 2011, the ‘Literary Interactions’ project has produced two field-changing volumes: one (co-edited with Christopher Whitton) focused on Latin literary and socio-literary interactions, 96-138 CE; and the other (co-edited with Rebecca Langlands and James Uden) looked at cross-cultural interactions between different communities of readers and writers in the Roman empire, 96-235 CE. The aim in both volumes was to refresh intertextuality studies by experimenting with new ways of articulating and studying intertextuality, interdiscursivity and cultural interactions. Both contribute to the wider study of literary communities and cultural interaction across the Roman empire and both make significant methodological contributions to the study of intertextuality in multiple disciplines.

This work has paved the way to her current research projects, ‘Visualising War and Peace: interplay between conflict narratives in ancient and modern cultures’ and Visualising Peace. Both projects explore the ways in which interplay between conflict narratives in different media has helped to canonise ideas about war and peace across time and space. Taking ‘narrative’ in the broadest sense of the word, Alice looks at visual representations, epigraphic evidence and cultural memory/oral traditions as well as written texts, with a view to understanding the evolution of discourses of war and peace within and between different communities, and the world-building nature of conflict storytelling. A recent volume (co-edited with Nicolas Wiater) – Visualising War across the Ancient Mediterranean: Interplay between Conflict Narratives in Different Media and Genres – focuses on interplay between a wide array of ancient conflict narratives, from 9th c. BCE-6th c. CE, covering near-Eastern, Jewish, early Christian and Greco-Roman material. Through a series of conferences, internships and outreach projects, Alice has also been laying the groundwork for some publications on interplay between ancient and modern war storytelling.

In 2025, Alice founded the Ancient Peace Studies Network. Mindful that we spend much more time thinking about and representing war than peace, she is using innovative research methods (including speculative history and useful fiction) to excavate ancient experiences and discourses of peace, with a particular focus on people whose voices have been missing from the historical record. Connected with this, she is interested in children and young people's views on conflict, past and present, and in the ways in which ideas of childhood, war and peace inform each other.

This research has inspired a number of outreach projects. Since 2019, Alice has been working with professional theatre company NMT Automatics, first on the development of their 2022 play, 'Tempus Fugit: Troy and Us', which fuses ancient and modern war stories to look critically at our habits of visualising male and female roles in military contexts, and more recently on a new play about peace and post-conflict recovery, provisionally titled Rena. She has also run workshops for theatre, film and documentary makers, discussing different approaches to dramatising war on stage and screen. She has run workshops for civilians, looking at the influence of past war stories on modern understandings of conflict; and she draws directly on her research when contributing to regular training courses for British Armed Forces. 

Together with colleague Nicolas Wiater, Alice founded the Visualising War podcast in 2021. She has since recorded around 100 episodes, interviewing a wide range of artists, composers, theatre makers, documentary makers, game designers, museum curators, conflict photographers, journalists, strategists, serving soldiers, veterans and academics. The aim of the podcast is to explore how stories or war and peace work, in many different media, and (above all) what they do to us. Alice is particularly interested in the 'feedback loop' between narrative and reality, whereby the stories we tell reflect reality (up to a point) but also help to shape it, by influencing how we think, feel and behave.

The podcast series has led to a range of new collaborations, including with  visual artists, conflict photographers, modern military strategists and NGOs, including Never Such Innocence. Alice is currently developing a new strand of research in partnership with academics in a range of disciplines (in particular, critical security studies, peace studies, childhood studies, and futures literacy) which will look specifically at the forces that shape children's habits of visualising war, and the impact which children's voices can have in shaping how adults approach both war and peace.

In addition to the projects mentioned above, Alice has published on Vitruvius’ De Architectura; Martial, Epigrams 10; Tacitus’ Agricola; Pliny the Younger’s Letters Bk 10; the Tactics of Aelianus Tacticus and Arrian; the didactics of the Latin exempla tradition; Latin military writing; and Roman civil war.

She has also pursued some pedagogic research (with Emma Buckley) on Latin language teaching, focusing particularly on the student experience; and she has recently pioneered a new approach to teaching Classics as an 'applied' subject, for which she has won two teaching prizes. 

She has contributed several times to BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time programme, and is regularly commissioned to write more ‘popular’ pieces (e.g. programme notes for the Baverian State Opera’s recent production of Handel’s Agrippina; entries for exhibition catalogues; articles for Ancient Warfare Magazine and The Scotsman).

As a member of the RSE Young Academy of Scotland Alice was involved in a range of cross-disciplinary projects that are addressing some of the most challenging issues facing society in Scotland and beyond: for example, on the principles for Responsible Debate, Human Rights and Academic Freedom, and the Future of Tertiary Education in Scotland. These projects draw on and feed into her academic research. Alice now co-directs the Centre for Responsible Debate.

PhD supervision

  • Nicholas Hallam

Selected publications

 

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