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.

Critics often discuss works of fiction by condensing them into a few resonant scenes. We are so attached to this strategy, in fact, that we sometimes apply it to history itself: New Historicists explicitly theorize the anecdote as an appropriately literary representation of the past. But why should minutes and hours be more literary than months…[Read more]

Critics often discuss works of fiction by condensing them into a few resonant scenes. We are so attached to this strategy, in fact, that we sometimes apply it to history itself: New Historicists explicitly theorize the anecdote as an appropriately literary representation of the past. But why should minutes and hours be more literary than months…[Read more]