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Faculty of Classics

 

Biography

I was an undergraduate and graduate student at Trinity College, Cambridge, and a Junior Research Fellow at Clare College. Since 2009 I have been a Fellow of Girton College and an Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Classics. In 2020-22 I was a COFUND Fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (AIAS), Aarhus University.

Research

Greek and Roman intellectual culture, especially responses to Hesiod and to Plato; hexametric poetic traditions in antiquity;  'apocalyptic' and eschatological literature in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds.

Publications

Key publications: 

Books

Eschatology in Antiquity (ed., with Marlow, H. & Pollmann, K.) (2021) Routledge. [42 chapters]

Playing Hesiod: The 'Myth of the Races' in Classical Antiquity (2015: paperback edn. 2019). Cambridge.

Articles and chapters

‘Locating Hesiod's daimones: above and below, near and far’, in Bakola, E., & Lunn-Rockliffe, S. (eds. forthcoming 2024) Locating the daimonic: daimones, space and place in the ancient Greek world. CHS/Ashgate.

'Anti-Roman Sibyl(s)', in Jolowicz, D. & Elsner, J. (eds. 2023) Articulating Resistance under the Roman Empire. Cambridge. 185-203

'"Vergil and Homer opened my books": the Sibylline Oracles and the non-Jewish canon', Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 32 (2022) 167-86

'Introduction' (co-authored with Marlow, H. & Pollmann, K) in (eds. 2021) Eschatology in Antiquity. Routledge. 1-15

'Hesiodic rhapsody: the Sibylline Oracles', in Fantuzzi, M., Morales, H. & Whitmarsh, T. (eds. 2021) Reception in the Greco-Roman World: Literary Studies in Theory and Practice. Cambridge. 344-70

‘Didactic and apocalyptic turns: clarity and obscurity, Homer and Hesiod in the Sibylline Oracles’, in Canevaro, L-G., & O’Rourke, D. (eds. 2019) Didactic Poetry of Greece, Rome and Beyond: Knowledge, Power, Tradition. Bloomsbury. 179-202

'The Ecology of the Sibylline Oracles’, in Hunt, A. & Marlow, H. (eds. 2019) Ecology and Theology in the Ancient Word: Cross-disciplinary Perspectives. Bloomsbury. 25-40

‘Hesiod transformed, parodied and assaulted: Hesiod in the Second Sophistic and early Christian thought’, in Loney, A. & Scully, S. (eds. 2018) The Oxford Handbook of Hesiod. Oxford. 395-410

'Philosophical traces in the Sibylline Oracles', in Klostergaard Peterson, A. & van Kooten, G. (eds. 2017) Religio-Philosophical Discourses in the Mediterranean World. Leiden. 103-25

'Aratus', in Oxford Bibliographies Online: Classics. Ed. Dee Clayman. Oxford University Press, 25-11-2011. http://www.oxfordbibliographiesonline.com/. Substantial updates published 28-3-2014 and 26-8-2020. 

'Hesiod’s Races and your own: Socrates' 'Hesiodic' project', in Boys-Stones, G. & Haubold, J. (eds. 2010) Plato and Hesiod. Oxford. 179-99

'Aratus' Maiden and the Source of Belief' in Harder, M.A., Regtuit, Regtuit, R. F. & Wakker, G. C. (eds. 2009) Nature and Science in Hellenistic Poetry. Leuven. 255-75

Other publications: 

Museum book

The Lawrence Room at Girton College (2019, ed. with the Lawrence Room Committee). Girton College, Cambridge. [Survey of its rationale and contents: https://issuu.com/girtoncollege/docs/the_year_2018-19_final_sc/s/156828 ]

Magazine publications

'The Sibylline Oracles: recyclable responses to crisis', Crisis: iPerspectives 3 (2023) 42-45

[https://aias.au.dk/fileadmin/www.aias.au.dk/IPerspectives/iPerspectives_magazine_Crisis_Issue_3_AIAS_Aarhus_University_DK.pdf 

'Long-range perspectives in the Iliad(2015) Omnibus 69.4-6

Wrigley Fellow, Director of Studies and College Associate Professor in Classics
Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Classics
Dr Helen  Van Noorden

Contact Details

Girton College
Cambridge
CB3 0JG
01223 767500 (Faculty), 760350 (College)
Not available for consultancy

Affiliations

Latest news

Election of two new Professors in the Faculty of Classics

27 March 2024

The Faculty is delighted to announce the election of Professor Josephine (Jo) Crawley Quinn to the Professorship of Ancient History and Professor Serafina Cuomo to the A. G. Leventis Professorship of Greek Culture . Jo will join the Faculty on 1 January 2025 and will be the first woman to hold the Professorship of Ancient...

Craven Seminar 2024

26 March 2024

The programme for the Craven Seminar 2024, ‘Interface Interpretation: exegesis as encounter in Greco-Roman literature’ , is now available online . This will be an in-person event. Please click here to register.

Classical Equalities Lecture 25 April 2024 at 17.00 in G19

4 March 2024

Jane Draycott will be giving this year’s Classical Equalities lecture, on ‘ Prostheses in Classical Antiquity: Everything You Never Knew You Wanted To Know’. Jane Draycott is Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Glasgow. Her research investigates science, technology, and medicine in the ancient world. She has...

Soundmarks Project

12 February 2024

Soundmarks, an art/archaeology collaboration between Rose Ferraby, Cambridge Archaeologist, and Rob St John using sound and visual art launches at DIG in York. In 2019 the pair created work exploring and animating the sub-surface landscape of Aldborough Roman Town in North Yorkshire, UK. Soundmarks Aldborough was re-shown...