Tom Phillips

After studying Literae Humaniores at Oxford, where I also did my graduate work and held teaching and research posts, I came to Manchester in 2018.

My first book dealt with the scholarly and literary reception of Pindar in antiquity, my second with the configuration of temporal experience in Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica. The interest in ancient literary scholarship and criticism that informs these books has led to the development of a long-term collaborative project to translate the scholia (remains of ancient commentaries) to the Iliad and to explore their role in the cultural life of Hellenistic and Imperial Greece. I have also co-edited books on Greek lyric and the relationship between music and ancient Greek literature. I continue to think and write about Greek and Latin lyric (especially Sappho, Pindar, and Horace) and Hellenistic poetry (especially Apollonius and Theocritus), and my current work on the Hellenism of P. B. Shelley has increasingly led me to consider ancient poetry in ecocritical and comparative perspectives.

Several of these interests are reflected in my teaching at Manchester, which spans a wide range of subjects and periods. I teach the first year course on Virgil’s Aeneid, as well as courses on the European pastoral tradition from Theocritus to Wordsworth, and on ancient art and aesthetic thought and their reception in the Renaissance.

I would be delighted to hear from prospective PhD students interested in studying Greek lyric, Hellenistic poetry, or Hellenism in the long eighteenth century.