University of Nottingham

Faculty Member, Classics

Associate Professor in Greek History

About

My current research interests focus on three different, though related, subjects. The one is the study of subaltern groups (poor citizens, foreigners, slaves) in ancient Greece. One of its more important aspects is an exploration of the relationship between multicultural communities, slavery and democracy in classical Athens. I am co-editing, together with Steve Hodkinson (Nottingham) and Marc Kleijwegt (Wisconsin) the Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Slaveries (Oxford University Press, 2012), a volume with a strong theoretical, historiographical and comparative perspective which aims to revolutionise the ways we study ancient slaveries. I have also co-organised together with Claire Taylor (TCD) an international conference on Communities and Networks in Ancient Greece (Dublin, 6-8/7/2009).
My second area of research centres around the effort to rethink Greek history outside Eurocentric and Hellenocentric assumptions and to situate it within a wider Mediterranean and Near Eastern perspective, a project which I have initially explored in my first book, Unthinking the Greek Polis: Ancient Greek History beyond Eurocentrism (Cambridge University Press, 2007). I am currently working on a book titled Greeks and Barbarians (Cambridge University Press, 2012). My aim is to challenge the currently prevailing model of a deep polarity between Greeks and non-Greeks by exploring the variety of ways in which Greeks related to non-Greeks and the complex 'middle ground' that shaped these relationships.
My third area of research is the history of historiography and political thought. I try to bring together the history of classical scholarship with the intellectual history of early modern and contemporary Europe. The aim is to show that the study of the past is neither the value-free exercise that positivist historians would make it, nor the continuous construction of novel fictions, as the post-modernists would have it. I have recently finished a book on Politics: Antiquity and its Legacy (I. B. Tauris / Oxford University Press: 2009), which examines the reception of ancient political thought in modern times. I have also explored in a number of published and forthcoming articles the contexts of employing ancient history during the eighteenth century.

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