Dr Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis is an art historian working on Classical material culture in the ancient Greek world, and on its reception in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is particularly interested in searching out marginalised, non-elite voices, and in exploring intimate, small scale encounters with objects within the natural or built landscape. There are two main strands in her research: first, religion, travel and the body in the Greek world of the Hellenistic and Roman periods and, second, the reception of Classical material culture, especially through travel and collecting practices, in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Dr Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis grew up in Greece and read Classics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford (BA 1995). She went on to study Art History (Byzantine and Classical) at The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London (MA 1996 and PhD 2001). She began her career teaching at University College Dublin (2001–2002), followed by a Special Leverhulme Research Fellowship at the University of Nottingham (2002-2005), where she had deferred a permanent lectureship. Between 2005 and 2012 she took a career break to bring up her three children. During this time she kept her hand in teaching, working part-time at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and at King’s College London (2012-2016). In 2017 she resumed full time work and joined the School of Classics at St Andrews. She has held research fellowships from The Leverhulme Trust (Special Fellowship, 2002-2005), the Loeb Classical Library Foundation (2020-2021), The British Academy (Midcareer Fellowship 2021), and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (Midcareer Fellowship 2022). She is co-founder of the Inclusive Classics Initiative, a partner organisation of the Institute of Classical Studies. She was shortlisted in The Times Higher Education 2021 Teaching Awards as ‘most innovative teacher of the year’, she received a University of St Andrews Teaching Excellence Award in 2020 and a McCall MacBain Foundation Outstanding Contribution to Teaching Excellence Award in 2019. She is currently on sabbatical and will be on a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2026-27 working on her project 'A new approach to the Elgin marbles: archaeology, intimacy and collecting’.