History

Art/Archaeology, History

In Times of War and Crisis: Regional Identities and Greek Archaeology

Challenging the way we view the development of Greek archaeological practices, my book-length project, “In Times of War and Crisis: Regional Identities and Greek Archaeology,” examines the intersections of identity politics and archaeological praxis in Ottoman Macedonia and Crete prior to their incorporation into the Greek state in 1913. These contested states were influenced by the success of the Greek Revolution, and my long-term project traces the broader impacts of… Read more

History

The End of the Histories: Land, Wealth, and Empire in Herodotus

The monograph interrogates the close of the first historical work, Herodotus’ Histories, as an entrée to key refrains in the work as a whole, including migration, wealth, and empire. K. Scarlett Kingsley (Agnes Scott College) and Tim Rood (Oxford) approach this passage ‘in the round’, examining its immediate context at the end of the Greco-Persian Wars and the beginning of Athenian imperial dominance; its interrelations with episodes stretching back to… Read more

History, Language/Literature

Xenophon on Liberality and Freedom: Ancient Aristocratic Values and Contemporary Inequalities

Xenophon’s use of slavery as an analogy for political unfreedom permeates his writings, including those revered by the country’s Founding Fathers, the Cyropaedia and the Memorabilia. Xenophon identifies the virtuous leading citizen and ruler through the absence of qualities described as andrapodes (‘of a man-footed beast’, perhaps ancient Greek’s most dehumanising term for the enslaved) and aneleutheron (‘unfree’). The restatement of the link between freedom and unfreedom as character traits… Read more

History, Language/Literature

Portraits of a Pharaoh: The Sesostris Tradition in Ancient Literature and Culture

When Greeks and Romans thought about Pharaonic Egypt, they would have named Sesostris as the land’s most iconic ruler. From his first appearance in Herodotus’ Histories to his afterlife in Byzantine historians, the Sesostris character played the roles of world-conqueror and Egyptian culture hero in Greek and Roman texts. Yet, while the Sesostris character was a creation of legend, he was based on three pharaohs of the Egyptian 12th Dynasty… Read more

History

Watchdogs of the People: Demagogues and Popular Culture in Ancient Greece

I spent a wonderful (all things considered) Spring semester 2020 at the Center for Hellenic Studies, where I worked primarily on my second book project, Watchdogs of the People: Demagogues, Populism, and Popular Culture in Ancient Greece, but also related projects. My book, which will be the first history of the phenomenon of demagoguery (or the “(mis)leading of the people”) across Greek antiquity, aims both to explain the emergence of… Read more