About

Amy Coker has over the last decade and a half held positions in Classics and Ancient History in the UK at the Universities of Manchester, Liverpool and Bristol, including a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship (2013-2016) for a project on Greek sexual and scatological vocabulary and ancient offensive language. She is now an Honorary Research Fellow of the University of Bristol (2018-) and teacher of Classics at Cheltenham Ladies’ College (2018-).

She has published work in the fields of historical linguistics, pragmatics and classics, most recently on the vocabulary of bodily fluids in Greek and Latin, the treatment of obscene language in the most well-known lexicon of Ancient Greek, Liddell and Scott, and on a filthy joke told by Cleopatra involving a ladle. She has work forthcoming on scatological humour in Greek, and on effects of Aristophanes’ use of insults on particular groups within the ancient city. Amy is also in the final stages of finishing a book on nouns with variable gender in ancient Greek, the topic of her PhD thesis.

She is a keen supporter of outreach and public engagement, and has worked with the UK charity Classics for All running projects to bring Latin and Greek teaching to schools which have no tradition of teaching these subjects.

I’m happy to share offprints of my work – please message or email me (amy.coker [at] bristol.ac.uk).

Here I am talking to the Manchester Classical Association in May 2021 about groups who are perceived to be sweary (NOTE – contains highly offensive language):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXctfC2xMng&t=1800s

I followed up many of these ideas in a blogpost for the Society for Classical Studies (November 2022) on how to read the bad language in the mouths of old women in Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen in the contemporary world:

https://classicalstudies.org/scs-blog/amy-coker/blog-rehabilitating-old-woman-or-reading-female-bad-language-aristophanes’