Faculty of Classics - University of Cambridge

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Greek and Roman history in Cambridge isn’t like Greek and Roman history anywhere else in the world.  For the last 50 years, at least, Greek and Roman historians in Cambridge have been grappling with big issues about the nature of Greek and Roman society and Greek and Roman politics.  Although engaged with the publication and exposition of classical texts, both newly discovered and long known, Cambridge ancient historians do not see themselves as contributing primarily to scholarship, but rather to the wider understanding of two exceptionally interesting and important past cultures.

Greek and Roman history in Cambridge has been made different by the individuals who have taught here.  Moses Finley’s background in the social sciences brought a new agenda to Greek and Roman history in the 1950s and 1960s; Peter Garnsey’s careful unpacking of the relationship between social and economic conditions, political thought and political practice opened up whole new areas of Greek and Roman history, above all the study of food and food supply, during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.  Keith Hopkins’ experience as a Professor of Sociology inflected his work on ancient religion as well as on ancient politics in the last two decades of the twentieth century.

Cambridge’s current staff in Greek and Roman history, many of whom have had long careers here, introduce themselves below.  As a group they offer expertise that covers the whole range of ancient history from the early Iron Age in Greece to the end of the Roman empire in the best.  They work on the full range of political, economic, social and cultural history.  Above all they work in a methodologically sophisticated way, as keen to tackle the fundamental problems of how one writes the history of past societies at all as to revisit the classic problems of Athenian democracy or late Republican Rome.

The liveliness of the group manifests itself in rich records of individual publication, but also in a range of conference activity every year, graduate seminars, and workshops.  There is a history of research projects stretching back to the era before research projects were fashionable and particularly manifested in recent years in involvement with projects that cross into other Faculties and Departments (in particular History and Archaeology).  Greek and Roman history in Cambridge is fully engaged at every level with the whole gamut of issues and evidence, from the most esoteric technical texts to the most banal archaeological finds.

Graduate students in Ancient History benefit from 24-hour access to the very fine Classics Faculty Library and from a Faculty with a continuous run of seminar activity.  Their progress is carefully overseen both by their own supervisor and by a secondary supervisor, and is further subject to annual review.  Faculty funds enable fieldwork (whether independently or through the British Schools of Athens and Rome) and other travel abroad, and arrangements with a range of European universities (particularly Bologna and Cologne).

The following ancient historians are currently active members of the faculty:

University Teaching Officers:

Mary Beard  Professor of Classics and Fellow of Newnham College, is a radical interpreter and critic of Roman culture in its widest sense.  She has written widely on Roman History and Culture, including Pompeii, which won the Wolfson History Prize, The Roman Triumph  and  Religions of Rome , 2 vols, with John North and Simon Price), and she also has an active interest in art history  (Classical Art: from Greece to Rome (written with John Henderson) and The Parthenon), as well as on the history of Classics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (The Invention of Jane Harrison).  She recently gave the Sather Lectures at Berkeley (on Roman Laughter) and the Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC (on images of Roman emperors from antiquity to now).  She is now turning both of these series into books.

Among her other activities, she is Classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement, author of the blog A Don’s Life, editor of a series of books entitled “Wonders of the World”, and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Roman Studies.  She is currently making a BBC 2 documentary series on ordinary life in ancient Rome (following up  a documentary on Pompeii) - and writing and presenting a classically-oriented short series of talks on BBC Radio 4, A Point of View.

Paul Cartledge is AG Leventis Professor of Greek Culture, but has broad interdisciplinary interests within the whole field of ancient world studies, having started his career with a doctoral thesis in (Spartan) archaeology at Oxford (1975, supervisor Professor Sir John Boardman).  He is the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of 20 or so books of varying weights and sizes, with a concentration on the history and reception of ancient Sparta, and of ancient democracy, and a concern to reach out to wider publics than just fellow-professionals.  In 2006 he published Thermopylae. the Battle that Changed the World, addressed to the same sort of general readership as his Alexander the Great. The Hunt for a New Past (revised edn 2005).  For students of classics, history and related disciplines he has written The Greeks. A Portrait of Self and Others (2nd edn, 2002) and Ancient Greece: a History in Eleven Cities (200p, pb. 2011), and edited and largely written The Cambridge Illustrated History of Ancient Greece (revised pb edn 2002).  He is co-editor of two monograph series, 'Key Themes in Ancient History' (for C.U.P., with Cambridge colleague, Peter Garnsey), and 'Classical Inter/Faces' (for Bloomsbury, with Susanna Morton Braund, originally of Cambridge, now UBC, Vancouver).  He is an honorary citizen of Sparta and holds the Gold Cross of the Order of Honour awarded by the President of the Hellenic Republic.  He is a Syndic (trustee) of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge University, and an active member of the pressure group The British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles.

Rebecca Flemming University Senior Lecturer in Classics, is a social and cultural historian of the ancient world, with wider historiographic and comparative interests too.  Best known for her groundbreaking work on the intersections of medicine and gender in the Roman Empire - explored most extensively in her book Medicine and the Making of Roman Women: Gender, Nature, and Authority from Celsus to Galen (2000) - she has also published essays and articles on a range of other aspects of classical medicine and society, on the religious roles of Roman women, and on Roman prostitution.  Dr Flemming is one of the holders, with colleagues from across the University, of the Wellcome Strategic Award, ‘Generation to Reproduction’ (2009-2014): http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/generation/ .  This major, interdisciplinary project aims systematically re-assess the history of reproduction from antiquity to the present day, with themes including: infertility and healing sanctuaries/shrines; debating generation in the ancient and late antique worlds; and the demographics of imperial cities.  She is also writing a book on medicine and empire in the Roman world.

Christopher Kelly  Reader in Ancient History, is a classicist and historian with a wide range of interests in the ancient world: these include government and power, its use and abuse, the society and culture of the Roman Empire from Augustus to Justinian, the rise of Christianity, and Edward Gibbon and the Grand Tour.  His books include Ruling the Later Roman Empire (Harvard UP, 2004), The Roman Empire: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2006) and Attila the Hun: Barbarian Terror and the Fall of the Roman Empire (Norton, New York, 2009) and two edited volumes, Unclassical Traditions I (Alternatives to the Classical Past in late Antiquity) and II (Perspectives from East and West in late Antiquity) (Cambridge, 2010 and 2011).  He was an editor of the Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society/Cambridge Classical Journal from 2000 to 2006 and is currently on the editorial committee of The Journal of Roman Studies.  He held a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship from 2006 to 2008.  Current projects include an edited volume, Theodosius II: the Reformation of the Roman Empire in late Antiquity (for Cambridge) and a monograph, Confronting the Classical: The Making of the Past in late Antiquity (for Harvard).

Paul Millett  University Senior Lecturer in Classics, was trained both as an economist and as a classicist, and now specialises in Greek social and economic history from the archaic to the Hellenistic period.  Part of his work is concerned with the character of the Greek economy - lending, borrowing, debt, money, credit - and part with more general aspects of the society and culture of Greece: peasant mentality, social status, law, slavery, patronage.  He is the author of Lending and Borrowing in Classical Athens , and a co-editor with Paul Cartledge of two volumes of articles NOMOS, Essays in Athenian Law, Politics and Society and KOSMOS, essays in order, conflict and community in Classical Athens.  His Theophrastus and his world (Cambridge Classical Journal. Supplementary volume ; no.33) was published in 2007.  He is currently working on the presentation of classical themes in 'Punch' magazine across its 150-year history.

Robin Osborne  Professor of Ancient History, has broad interdisciplinary interests in the history, archaeology and art of Greece in the archaic to hellenistic periods.  He is the author of standard monographs on archaic Greek history (Greece in the Making 1200-479 BC) and on Greek art (Archaic and Classical Greek Art).  He is responsible for the latest edition of a source book on the Athenian Empire (LACTOR 1, 2000), for an introduction, translation and commentary of Ps.-Xenophon The Constitution of the Athenians (LACTOR 2, 2004), for the revision of the JACT World of Athens volume (2008), and, with P.J. Rhodes, for a collection of fourth-century B.C. inscriptions with translation and commentary, Greek Historical Inscriptions 404–323 BC.  He has also edited and co-edited a number of collections on various aspects of the history, art, and archaeology of classical Greece.  He directed the AHRB Research Project on cultural revolution at Athens at the end of the fifth century B.C. from which Rethinking Revolutions through Classical Greece was published by Cambridge University Press in 2006 and Debating the Athenian Cultural Revolution in 2007.  A collection of his papers on classical Athens was published in 2010 (Athens and Athenian Democracy, Cambridge University Press).  His most recent book is The History Written on the Classical Greek Body (Cambridge University Press, 2011).  He was President of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 2002-6, has been Chairman of the Council of University Classical Departments since 2006 and is a member of the editorial boards of Past & Present, Journal of Hellenic Studies, Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology, American Journal of Archaeology and Omnibus.

John Patterson  University Senior Lecturer in Classics, is a Roman historian, whose undergraduate teaching has ranged in recent years from the early history of Rome to the high Empire.  He is currently preparing a new third-year special subject on ‘Carthage and Rome’, to be taught with Robin Osborne from 2012-13.  However, his main research interests lie in the history and archaeology of Rome and of Italy, from the mid Republic to the Empire.

His book Landscapes and Cities: Rural Settlement and Civic Transformation in Early Imperial Italy (Oxford University Press, 2006) relates changes in town and country in Italy under the early Empire to broader social and economic trends.  Many of his publications deal with related questions, including the supposed agricultural crisis in first century AD Italy, the role of collegia in and beyond the burial of the dead in the Roman city, social mobility within local elites, imperial benefaction in Italy, and several studies of specific areas of Italy using field-survey data and inscriptions.  Together with Emmanuele Curti and Emma Dench, he reviewed recent research in south and central Italy for the Journal of Roman Studies in 1996.

Another particular research interest relates to the topography and history of the City of Rome in antiquity: as well as reviewing recent work in the city for JRS in 1992 and 2010, he has contributed to the Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae with a series of articles on roads within the city walls, and has written on housing and burial in the city Political Life in the City of Rome (Bristol Classical Press, 2000) takes a topographical approach to the hotly debated topic of the structures of Roman politics, stressing the physical background against which politics took place.  He is currently writing a more general book on the City of Rome for Blackwell.

Caroline Vout  University Senior Lecturer in Classics, is a cultural historian with a particular interest in the Roman imperial period, especially in visual culture and its reception.  She has written on a wide range of topics including the city of Rome, art and identity, ancient dress and the construction of the imperial image.  Recent publications include Power and Eroticism in Imperial Rome (CUP, 2007) and chapters in The Blackwell Companion to Petronius (2009) and The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Historians (2010).  Her next book, The Hills of Rome: Signature of an Eternal City will be published by CUP in 2012.  She is one of the judges of the Criticos Prize and on the editorial board of the Cambridge Classical Journal, Omnibus and Perspective.

Research Fellows:

Phil Booth is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow.  He teaches the history of Europe and the Middle East from antiquity to the middle ages, but his research focuses on late antiquity, in particular on the late Romam, late Sasanian and early Islamic history of the seventh century, and the various literate cultures of the eastern late-antique world (esp. Greek, Armenian, Coptic, Syriac, Arabic, Ethiopic).  He is the author of a forthcoming monograph on the seventh-century Palestinian ascetics John Moschus, Sophronius of Jerusalem and Maximus Confessor, and is at present producing a new translation and commentary of the Chronicle of John of Nikiou, the major contemporary witness to the Muslim conquest of Roman Egypt.

Alessandro Launaro  British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, researches on social and economic aspects in the archaeology and history of Roman Italy, with special emphasis on the development of the rural landscape between Late Republic and Early Empire.  He has taken part in several fieldwork activities in Italy (excavations/surveys in Liguria, Tuscany and Marche) and – together with Martin Millett – he is director of the Roman Colonial Landscapes project (Lazio), an integrated study of the Roman town of Interamna Lirenas and its territory by way of geophysical prospection, field survey and thorough analysis of local productions (especially coarseware pottery and building materials).  His book Peasants and slaves. The rural population of Roman Italy (200 BC to AD 100) has been published in the Cambridge Classical Studies series in 2011.

Hannah Willey is the W. H. D. Rouse Research Fellow at Christ's College.  Her interests cover all aspects of Greek religion and society and her work concerns in particular questions of community, authority and identity.  Her doctoral thesis explores the relationship between law and religion in the archaic and classical Greek poleis, addressing, inter alia, the early lawgiver traditions, the construction of authority in inscribed laws, the Greek treatment of distinctively religious crimes and the role of the gods and religious mechanisms in legal enforcement and punishment.  Her next research project will focus on ancient Greek cult foundations and their tellings and retellings from the Archaic through to the Roman period.  She has taught for the Classics and History faculties and organises the Cultural History reading group every fortnight.

• The Caucuses
  • A Caucus (Literature)
  • B Caucus (Philosophy)
  • C Caucus (History)
  • D Caucus (Art and Archaeology)
  • E Caucus (Linguistics)
  • X Caucus (Interdisciplinary)

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