I am a Classical Reception scholar with a special interest in the reception of ancient Greek and Roman culture among the British working classes and the international left.

I welcome expressions of interest from postgraduate students who would like to work with me for their PhD on classical reception topics, especially those that might align with my own research interests. I am also up for co-supervising creative PhD projects, where writers / artists wish to engage with some aspect of classical antiquity. 

BRAVE NEW CLASSICS

My current long term research project is called Brave New Classics. It began life in May 2016 as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship hosted by Open University. Until May 2019 it investigated the unlikely but electric convergence of classics and British communism to 1956. The project has since extended its scope and now explores the relationship between world communism and the classics, and aims for the BNC website to serve as a platform for international and collaborative research into the subject. The work dovetails with my previous study on working-class engagements with Greek and Roman culture in Britain and Ireland to 1939. 

CLASSICS AND CLASS IN BRITAIN

I was the Research Associate on the major AHRC-funded research project into working-class receptions of ancient Greek and Roman culture, led by Prof. Edith Hall and hosted by King’s College London (Jan 2013-Dec 2015). Our website can be visited here, and our jointly edited volume, Greek and Roman Classics and the British Struggle for Social Reform (Bloomsbury, 2015), is currently available in all good legal deposit libraries. Additionally, we have a joint authored book (Routledge, 2020) entitled A People’s History of Classics. 

Before working on Classics and Class I was completing my first classical reception project, which grew from my doctoral thesis.

A COCKNEY CATULLUS

At the Open University and University of Oxford, 2008-11 I held the Michael Comber Studentship for Classical Reception. I examined the reception of the Roman poet Catullus in Romantic-era Britain. The book is now published by Oxford University Press as A Cockney Catullus (2015).