Sally Mubarak

Sally Mubarak is a PhD candidate at the University of St Andrews, supervised by Dr. Andrea Brock and Dr. Nicolas Wiater. She is the recipient of the World-Leading St Andrews Scholarship in Classics. Her work examines war and trauma in the Roman Republic and the wider ancient Mediterranean. She holds a Masters degree (First Class Honours) from the University of Auckland (2021), where she also completed her BA (First Class Honours). Her Masters thesis, ‘Whitewashing' the Samnites – A Case Study in the Historiography of Roman Republican Imperialism,’ was supervised by Dr. Jeremy Armstrong.

Sally is the assistant lab director of the Medieval History and Archaeology Lab at St Andrews. She has tutored and marked several courses at various undergraduate levels in Classical Studies (Classical Mythology) and Ancient History (Ancient Dynasties, Democracy and Empire; Roman Revolutions; Early Rome). She has held research assistant positions for various projects, including work on the Marsden Project, ‘Blood and money: playing the ‘Game of Thrones’ in the ancient Mediterranean’ and copyediting for multiple edited volumes. In 2021 she was a visiting scholar at Victoria University of Wellington (Māori: Te Herenga Waka) and completed a funded research course at the British School at Rome in 2022.

Her research interests also include the role of socio-political boundaries, liminality, and identity in ancient military interactions, as well as Roman expansion and Italian elite networks in the fourth to second centuries BCE. She has worked extensively on the role of ‘whiteness’ and the impact of colonial research frameworks in the study of ancient history.  Ares is the name of her cat ­– a three-year-old British Blue.