The Open University

Faculty Member, Classical Studies

Lecturer

About

My research draws on a wide range of ancient Greek literary works and explores the ways in which the latest digital technologies can be used in academia.

My recent book, 'Entering the Agon: Dissent and Authority in Homer, Historiography and Tragedy' (Oxford University Press, 2009), investigates the interrelationship between literature and culture by analysing representations of debate across three major genres within a hermeneutic framework of institutional dissent from authority. I have also published widely on the epic cycle, Archilochus, Herodotus and Greek tragedy.

I am currently Principal Investigator of three major projects that use the latest digital technology to enhance the interrogation and dissemination of ancient texts:

1. Involving the collaboration of academics from Classics, Geography and Archaeological Computing, and sponsored by the AHRC, HESTIA (the Herodotus Encoded Space-Text-Image Archive) uses a digital text of Herodotus' Histories to extract all the ancient places mentioned in the narrative and queries the results using web-mapping technologies such as GIS, GoogleEarth and GoogleMaps. Based closely on Herodotus' narrative of events rather than any abstract depiction of the Earth, our series of maps challenge the popular division of the ancient world into east vs. west; instead they draw attention to an underlying network culture that criss-crosses and brings together the two territories.

2. GAP (Google Ancient Places), funded by a research grant from the Google, builds on HESTIA by pioneering a search-tool that facilitates the discovery of ancient locations, and then by experimenting with ways of visualizing the results.  It aims to develop the means of discovering ancient places not only in a single text like Herodotus' Histories but using the entire corpus of GoogleBooks.

3. DIALOG (Document and Integrate Ancient Linked Open Geodata) has recently secured funding from JISC with the aim of bringing together datasets related to ancient locations. Our project partners, each working on a different aspect of ancient world research, come from around the globe: Archaeological Computing Research Group (Southampton), Pleiades (NYU), Perseus (Tufts), Arachne (Cologne), Supporting Productive Queries for Research (KCL London), Digital Memory Engineering (Austrian Institute of Technology).

I was awarded a special teaching prize while supervising for Pembroke, Cambridge, and whilst at Christ Church, Oxford I was awarded teaching excellence awards by the University of Oxford on two consecutive years (2006 and 2007).

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