Classics, Ancient History, Linguistics, Academia and more
Over the last few years, the field has been hugely enriched by lots of innovative new books on pre-Roman Italy and its populations. Many of them have really committed to interdisciplinary methods, combining historical, archaeological and linguistic evidence - with great results. Even better, these books are perfect to set for undergraduate reading (if you... Continue Reading →
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 →
This time last year, I set myself a reading challenge for 2016. My goal was to expand my horizons a bit, and discover authors and genres I might otherwise miss out on. You can see the original challenge list here - I think over all I did well, both in covering the items on the... Continue Reading →
My review of Harry Potter and the Classical World by Richard A. Spencer is now online at the Classics for All online reading room. As you can tell from the review, I enjoyed this book great deal! It goes into an incredible amount of detail about the Classical allusions in the Harry Potter series - perhaps... Continue Reading →
Around the time of the EU referendum, I wrote a review of Moving Romans: Migration to Rome in the Principate by Laurens E. Tacoma. Ancient migration has been very prominent in my work recently: the Greek in Italy project just hosted a conference on ancient migration and mobility in May this year, and this book helped... Continue Reading →
I mentioned over here that there were some mentions of Oscan in Marcel Mauss's The Gift, and also that there were some problems with some of the English translations of this essay. I thought I'd expand on this year, in case anyone happens to be reading The Gift and wants to know a bit more about... Continue Reading →
The new book Échanger en Méditerranée: Acteurs, pratiques et normes dans les mondes anciens turned up in my pigeon hole this week - and I'm thrilled to see it in physical form at last! I was also sent some beautifully produced physical off-prints of my chapter - I haven't seen one of them in ages, and they look... Continue Reading →
Over the Easter holidays, I've been reading Mary Beard's SPQR, which I highly recommend. I was particularly pleased that so much of it focusses on early Rome and its relationship with Italy - it was at least a third of the way through before we even got to Sulla. Mary, as usual, brings out all... Continue Reading →
I'm reviewing a book this week called Vanishing Acts On Ancient Greek Amulets by Christopher A. Faraone. It's a short monograph that's incredibly rich in detail, using magical amulets in Greek, Latin and other languages to trace developments in how healing spells were spoken and written from the first century to the sixth century AD. In particular,... Continue Reading →
A Boxing Day walk, Petworth I'm having a lovely Christmas break with family this week, and going on lots of Sussex walks (exhibit A above). And I've had plenty of space to think about the coming year. I'm not a resolutions person exactly, but I like having some ideas about what I'd like to... Continue Reading →
Katherine McDonald 