Whilst “The Problem with Linear B” (https://hcommons-staging.org/deposits/item/hc:20833/) focused on the physical or visual aspects of Linear objects, this paper mainly examines the secondary assumptions and arguments used to support the thesis that those objects are purely administrative.

My poetic Preface to Kathleen Biddick’s book, “Make and Let Die: Untimely Sovereignties” (punctum books, 2016), which is indebted to and adapted from Adrienne Rich’s poem “Diving into the Wreck,” which sketches out the exploratory soundings of a sea-wreck of forgotten histories that bears uncanny resonances with Kathleen Biddick’s own acediou…[Read more]

A 5-page paper discussing the Linear signage and visual aspects of a Linear B tablet from Thebes, Greece, apparently discovered in the 1990s.

“Liquid Beowulf” serves as the Introduction to “The Postmodern Beowulf: A Critical Casebook” (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2006), and makes an argument for the Old English poem as a richly inter- and cross-temporal cultural response to historical traumas that still haunt our present moment and which also poses always important (and…[Read more]

Extending an argument presented in two articles published Studies in Art Education and Visual Arts Research, I discuss what would a poetic historiography mean for art education research.

Review of C. Tsagalis (ed.), “Poetry in Fragments: Studies on the Hesiodic Corpus and its Afterlife.” Trends in Classics – Supplementary Volumes, 50. Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2017

Notice of (D.) Sider (ed.) Hellenistic Poetry. A Selection. Pp. xx + 579, ills. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017. Paper, US$49.50 (Cased, US$90). ISBN: 978-0-472-05313-1 (978-0-472-07313-9 hbk).

The significance and influence of Attic drama on Hellenistic poetry has been a topic of little consistent focus in recent scholarship, reflecting the dominant academic emphasis on Hellenistic poetry as a written artefact, allegedly detached from any immediate context of performance. This paper attempts to reverse this trend by setting out the…[Read more]

Drawing on rabbinic sources redacted in the early third and late fourth/ early fifth centuries, this paper tracks the intertwined lives of divine image-things and rabbis living in late Roman and Byzantine period Palestine. The paper argues that the religious image-things of others (or avodah zarah, in rabbinic terms) pressed in different ways on…[Read more]

The book demonstrates the invalidity of existing assumptions about the administrative nature of Linear B (“Mycenaean Greek”) and related objects, proposes an alternative revolving around cult art, and explores similar evidence relating to scripts and art from the same and other regions and periods.

In the libraries of Celsus at Ephesus and of Rogatianus at Timgad, the function of which is attested by inscriptions, bookcases are usually reconstructed in the niches. These examples have been used to identify other buildings which contained niches as libraries. However, Lora Johnson, in her 1984 Ph.D. thesis, rightfully questioned such an…[Read more]

This paper describes a catalogued but rare manuscript (call number 170/307) held by the Charles Young Research Library at UCLA, in which one can find the by-laws of a barely known medieval confraternity, located in the city of Teruel and devoted to St. Julian.
Most of these by-laws were written around 1402, although it does also…[Read more]

This report presents preliminary results of experimental archaeological investigations on the reproduction of the Roman porridge puls. The archaeological experiment “LNF2012” was performed under laboratory conditions as part of the “Lange Nacht der Forschung” 2012 on April 27, at the Department of Classical Archaeology of the University of Vie…[Read more]

This is a combined museum catalogue entry discussing coins from ancient Egypt.

This essay offers an introduction to select disciplinary developments in the study of history and in historical study of the Hebrew Bible. It focuses first and foremost on “cultural history,” a broad category defined by nineteenth- and twentieth-century developments in anthropology and sociology, literary theory and linguistics, and other fie…[Read more]

These are the slides from a talk given at the JACT Summer School, Bryanston, on 1/8/2018.
How did ancient Greek writers and poets use imaginary cities to think about how to live well, what kind of community to develop, and how to maintain relationships between individual, community and cosmos? From Homer to Aristotle, the imaginary city provides…[Read more]

These slides accompany my talk ‘The Fragility of Democracy’, presented at the Faculty of Classics, Oxford Open Day, 27th June 2018, and also at other venues and events.

An essay on the Greeks in Egypt during the Archaic and Classical periods.

Notes on the book Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer—a book by Richard E. Palmer (Evanston: Nortwestern UP, 1969). Part I: On the Definition, Scope, and Significance of Hermeneutics; Part II: Four Major Theorists (Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger and Gadamer); Part III: A Hermeneutical M…[Read more]

The resemblance between the Gospel story about Jesus stilling a storm in the Sea of Galilee (Mt. 8:18, 23-27, Mk. 4:35-41, Lk. 8:22-25) and the Jonah story (Jon. 1:1-16) has been long acknowledged by scholars. This article contends that since the relations between the two stories are those of polar opposition, it should be possible, by way of…[Read more]