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Personal profile

Biography

I came to Manchester in 2001. Before that I was a graduate student at University College London, and before that an undergraduate at The Queen's College, Oxford. From 4 January 2023 I am leaving Manchester to take up the MacDowell Chair of Greek at the University of Glasgow.

I am a Latin American, born in Panamá to a Mexican mother and an English father. I went to school just outside Panama City and then in Chester (two very different places). 

My grandparents were from four different countries; I was born in a fifth. I am strongly of the belief that Classics should be as international and diverse as possible: I am happy to talk to students from any background, esp. those from historically under-represented groups, nations or communities, who are interested in Classics at university at any level: email me! (Si les conviene me pueden escribir en español.)

I am the author of The Narrator in Archaic Greek and Hellenistic Poetry (Cambridge, 2007) and Performances and Audiences in Pindar's Sicilian Victory Odes (London, 2007), and co-editor of Ancient Letters (Oxford, 2007) and Lucretius (Oxford, 2013). A third monograph of mine (Apollonius Rhodius, Herodotus and Historiography) examining Apollonius Rhodius’ use of historiography (especially Herodotus) for Cambridge University Press, has just been published (2020). One of my major current projects is a commentary on selected poems of Callimachus (for the Cambridge 'Green and Yellow' series). I am also working extensively on ancient epistolography, both in a number of recent and forthcoming articles and in the AHRC project I am co-directing (see further below). I am co-directing (with Doug Field in English & American Studies) the interdisciplinary Manchester Centre for Correspondence Studies, which has developed out of the Manchester Lives and Afterlives of Letters network, bringing together scholars working on different types of correspondence from across different periods and disciplines.

Between January 2013 and January 2018 I was Editor of Classical Quarterly (with Bruce Gibson of the University of Liverpool and Costas Panayotakis of the University of Glasgow). I am now the Chair of the Editorial Board of the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library. I was Head of Classics & Ancient History from 2014 to 2016 and then again in 2017-18.

Since December 2016 I have been co-directing (with Roy Gibson) an AHRC-funded project on ancient letter collections, which will run to 2024 and produce two books, one a critical review of all surviving letter collections in Greek and Latin up to about AD 400, the other a synoptic, interpretative monograph on ancient letter collections and their principles of order and arrangement.

 

 

Research interests

My main research interests include the following:

  • Hellenistic poetry, Archaic Greek Lyric (especially Pindar and Bacchylides), Archaic elegy and iambos, Homer, Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns, performance/reperformance of Greek poetry, orality and literacy
  • Lucretius, Horace, ancient epistolography (both Greek and Latin), esp. letter collections and their order and arrangement, Herodotus and the Hellenistic poets (esp. Apollonius of Rhodes)
  • Epicureanism (particularly with reference to Lucretius and Philodemus), the reception of philosophical ideas in 'literary' texts

 

 

Further information

Additional Information

Supervision areas:

I am particularly keen to hear from potential PhD students looking to work on ancient letter collections, esp. Greek pseudepigraphic letters. There is a wealth of work to be done in editing and interpreting the letters, and the potential for collaborative doctorates on particular mss, material philology, reading practices in the medieval and Renaissance periods and much more.

I am also more than happy to supervise postgraduate students on Homer, Archaic Greek poetry (especially Hesiod, Homeric Hymns, Pindar, Sappho, Archilochus, Hipponax, and early elegy), Hellenistic poetry (especially Callimachus, Theocritus and Apollonius), Horace (esp. the hexameter poems), Lucretius, ancient literary criticism, particularly Aristotle's Poetics, the literary aspects of Plato and Xenophon, and some topics in historiography (esp. Herodotus).

 

Supervision information

Completed PhD theses supervised as main supervisor:
 
2020

Katharine Mawford, ‘Changing Shapes and Fluid Forms: Shapeshifters in Greek Poetry’.

2016

Katherine Molesworth, ‘Lycophron's Alexandra: Vision and Voice’.

2011

Philippa Bather, ‘Intertextuality in Horace’s Hexameter Poetry and Ovid’s Erotic Elegies’ (jointly supervised with Prof. Alison Sharrock).

 

 

Open Access Theses

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