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]

This special issue of Religions of South Asia is born out of this expanding area of study and collaboration between contemporary practitioners and established academic methods of study. Most of articles in this volume were first presented at an international ‘Yoga Darśana, Yoga Sādhana’ conference hosted in Kraków, Poland in May 2016. The Krakow…[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 course is an introduction to the theory and practice of meditation systems in Asia taught at McMaster University in Fall 2018

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.

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.

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]

Review of Jenny Strauss Clay, Irad Malkin, Yannis Z. Tzifopoulos (ed.), Panhellenes at Methone: graphê in Late Geometric and Protoarchaic Methone.
Trends in classics – supplementary volumes, 44 .

During most of Antiquity, the Greek-speaking kingdoms in Cyprus used syllabic writing systems for the Cypriot dialect. Paphos, which was one of the most powerful kingdoms in the island, used a special variant of the Cypriot syllabary. Although the circumstances seemed to favour the adoption of the Greek alphabet as a writing system, the Paphians…[Read more]

This dissertation examines the idea of ethical revaluation — taking things we normally see as good for our flourishing and seeing them as neutral or bad, and vice versa — in the Mahāyāna Buddhist thinker Śāntideva. It shows how Śāntideva’s thought on the matter is more coherent than it might otherwise appear, first by examining the consistency…[Read more]

Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory insists that valid knowledge must be derived from paradigms: sets of injunctions and social practices that lead to replicable experiences. Wilber claims that the theory still includes the essentials of premodern traditions, because the essentials of those traditions consist of a phenomenological core of practices l…[Read more]

Aristotle’s account of kingship in Politics 3 responds to the rich discourse on kingship that permeates Greek political thought (notably in the works of Herodotus, Xenophon and Isocrates), in which the king is the paradigm of virtue, and also the instantiator and guarantor of order, linking the political microcosm to the macrocosm of the u…[Read more]

This course explores the art, archaeology, and culture of the Greek world from the prehistory to the Roman period. The course focuses on architecture, sculpture, painted pottery, and wall painting as its main object classes and situates artistic and stylistic developments within their social, political, and historical context. We will consider…[Read more]

This first-year seminar provides an introduction to the archaeology and urban development of the city of Rome from antiquity through to the present day. Students will survey the period from the foundation of the city through to the twenty-first century with an eye toward understanding the urbanism and material culture of the city of Rome. Case…[Read more]

This provocation contests the familiar construction of classical Athens as an ideal exemplar of democratic politics through a focus on the city’s material fabric, its visual artworks, and the performances which took place within its public spaces. It highlights the city’s ongoing process of material re-building (particularly following the Per…[Read more]