Biography
I was an undergraduate at Peterhouse, studying English but smuggling in Greek wherever possible; I borrowed an Odyssey paper from the Classics Tripos, and wrote a dissertation about Sappho and Shelley. Awarded a Henry Fellowship, I then spent a year as a ‘Special Student’ at Yale, digging into the H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) archive in the Beinecke Library. After a two-year stint as a schoolteacher with Teach First in Bournemouth, and a year working for a free-expression NGO, I returned to academia to train as a classicist. I completed my graduate studies at Oxford, and held teaching positions at Oxford and at Warwick, before moving to Cyprus to take up a postdoctoral research fellowship. I came to Cambridge in December 2025 as a Teaching Associate in the Faculty of Classics.
Research
I work on archaic and classical Greek literature, especially lyric, drama, and their reception; much of my research focuses on ancient emotions and conceptions of the mind. In my doctoral dissertation, I presented an interdisciplinary examination of ‘good fear’ as a theme in Aeschylean tragedy and Athenian culture, reflecting contemporary research on the emotions in philosophy, sociology, and cognitive science. I am now revising the dissertation for publication. I have also co-edited a volume on the imagination in ancient Greece, and published articles on Sappho, Alcman, and choral deliberation; forthcoming are chapters on pathos and the ‘mystic drama’ at Eleusis, kinaesthetic spectatorship in the prologue of Sophocles’ Ajax, and the role of the chorus in Seneca’s tragedies. My next project is about sympathy and resonance as modes of aesthetic response in the ancient world.
Publications
· Buxton, X. Csapo E., and Newby, Z. (eds). Forthcoming. The Experience of Ancient Festivals. Berlin: De Gruyter. (Accepted February 2026)
· Buxton, X. Forthcoming. ‘Introduction’. In: X. Buxton, E. Csapo, and Z. Newby (eds), The Experience of Ancient Festivals. Berlin: De Gruyter.
· Buxton, X. Forthcoming. ‘Pathos and Drama: Reconstructing the Emotional Experience of Eleusis’. In: X. Buxton, E. Csapo, and Z. Newby (eds), The Experience of Ancient Festivals. Berlin: De Gruyter.
· Buxton, X. Forthcoming. 'Deliberating with Choruses in Early Greek Tragedy', Mnemosyne. (Accepted October 2025)
· Buxton, X. 2025. 'Many-Headed Song: Configuring the Archaic Lyric Chorus as a Group Mind', Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies. Advance online publication.
· Buxton, X. and E. Clifford (eds) 2023. The Imagination of the Mind in Classical Athens: Forms of Thought. London: Routledge.
· Buxton, X. 2023. 'Performing the Mind: Aeschylus' Suppliants and the Theatre of "Deep Thought"'. In: X. Buxton and E. Clifford (eds), The Imagination of the Mind in Classical Athens: Forms of Thought, 271-99. London: Routledge.
· Buxton, X. and E. Clifford 2023. 'Introduction'. In: X. Buxton and E. Clifford (eds), The Imagination of the Mind in Classical Athens: Forms of Thought, 1-52. London: Routledge.
· Buxton, X. 2011. 'Sappho and Shelley: Lyric in the Dative', Cambridge Quarterly 40.4, 342-361.
