Sian Lewis

My research encompasses ancient Greek political and social history, with a particular focus on innovative approaches to ancient material. At the beginning of my career I worked on the transmission of news in classical Greece and the development of ancient media. I then followed my interest in the history of gender to write on the representation of women on Greek painted pottery; my study The Athenian Woman: an iconographic handbook has had significant influence on subsequent approaches to the topic. Similarly my work on ancient tyranny as a mode of government helped bring a neglected topic to prominence.

Since 2013 my research has focused on human-animal interactions in the classical world: with Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones I co-authored a major reference work on ancient animals which brings together archaeological and literary evidence and considers issues of ancient taxonomy and scientific thought. My current research project, Zoa Politika: animals that live in the polis, draws on this material to study animal-human interactions across the Greek Mediterranean, identifying the distinctive animal experience of individual poleis and demonstrating how each Greek community created a ‘conceptual bestiary’ of its own.

Over the next five years I aim to initiate a larger project building on the recently-formed Ancient Mediterranean Animals Network (https://www.aman-uk.org/), to create an interactive database of animal regionality which will make research data more widely available and encourage conversations between classicists, zooarchaeologists and environmental scientists. 

I welcome research students in any area of my interests above, and particularly those intending to work on ancient animal studies.

I teach broadly across Greek and Roman history, with a concentration in archaic and classical Greek history and in the study of gender in antiquity. Also of particular interest to me in teaching are ancient animal-human interactions, sensory history and the 'hidden voices' of antiquity.

My current Honours modules are:

• CL4438 Animals in the Greco-Roman World
• CL4442 Greek Painted Pottery
• CL4445 Women in Ancient Societies
• AN4146 Athens, Sparta and Thebes 478-338 BC

I grew up in South Wales and gained my MA and DPhil from University College, Oxford. At the start of my career I held temporary lectureships at Trinity College, Dublin, St John's College in Oxford and Swansea University; in 1996 I was appointed as Lecturer in Ancient History at Cardiff University. In 2004 I moved from Cardiff to take up my present post in St Andrews.