I'm very pleased to say that Italy Before Rome: A Sourcebook is now under contract with Routledge, as part of the Routledge Sourcebooks for the Ancient World series. The book is based on my module 'Italy Before Rome', which ran in 2017/18 - but with plenty more material and, crucially, new translations of the material we covered.... Continue Reading →
Blog
Rhaetic on screen
I was amazed to hear recently that there is a film out where the dialogue is in Rhaetic. This is one of the more obscure languages of ancient Italy, and not one which usually gets a lot of attention. [NB - some links and videos in this post include images of human remains.] Iceman (2017) is a... Continue Reading →
Heatwave archaeology
The UK (and many other areas of the world) has been experiencing a prolonged heatwave this summer. Some love it, and some hate it, but it's clearly been fantastic for archaeologists. In the dry weather, grass and crops dry out at different rates depending on what the soil underneath is like - where there was... Continue Reading →
From the blogosphere: Bottoms and wombs
The ancient blogosphere has been alive with excellent blog posts this week (is it an end-of-term thing? Must be). Two posts particularly caught my eye for their new perspective on well-known ancient objects. In her post 'A Reversed Perspective: Looking at Greek and Roman Art from Behind(s)', Sarah Bond presents a round-up of some of... Continue Reading →
Translating communities
There's been a lot of interesting discussion recently in the Classics Twitter-sphere about translation - and specifically about sexism in translation. Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey has been the catalyst for a lot of this discussion, and she has been outspoken about the deficiencies that she sees in previous translations, including sexism and the... Continue Reading →
Reblogged: Writing for the stars
Here's a lovely post by CREWS Project colleague Philip Boyes on some of the fictional writing systems used in Star Wars. The examples of handwriting are particularly fun ways in which the filmmakers have used writing in very human ways. Philip also has interesting things to say on how useful or 'realistic' these strategies actually... Continue Reading →
Goodbye Greek in Italy; hello Connectivity and Competition
This week marks the end of the AHRC-funded 'Greek in Italy' project. James Clackson, the PI of the project and my former PhD supervisor, has written a great post to mark the end of the project. He doesn't just look back at what the project has achieved - quite a lot in four years! -... Continue Reading →
Omnibus and History Today
I'm pleased to announce that I have a piece in this month's Omnibus magazine. This schools' Classics magazine is published by the Classical Association, and you can find out more on their website. I've not actually had my copy yet, but I'm told it looks something like this! My piece is on 'Women in their own words... Continue Reading →
Snow days
Campus has been closed by heavy snow for two days this week. (I have plenty of food and heating and water - so I'm fine so far.) Too snowy and icy to climb up the hill, but not too snowy for some photos early this morning! These were taken around 7.30 when, as you can... Continue Reading →
New module: Italy Before Rome
I've held off posting about my new module, Italy Before Rome, for two reasons. Most importantly, I've been extremely busy writing and teaching it! But I've also held back because, although I had a vision for what I wanted the module to be like, and the ideas I wanted to get across, I didn't know... Continue Reading →