Elected June 2020

Dr Henriette van der Blom is Senior Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Birmingham [www.birmingham.ac.uk/henriettevanderblom]. Her research focuses on the political life and oratorical culture of the Roman republic and early Empire, especially the history of the late Roman republic, patterns of political careers, all aspects of Cicero, oratory and rhetoric, exempla and cultural memory. She has published Cicero's Role Models (OUP 2010), Oratory and Political Career in the late Roman Republic (CUP 2016), several edited volumes on oratory and politics and on historical consciousness, and a string of articles/chapters on the reception of republican oratory in the early imperial period. As the founding director of Network for Oratory and Politics [www.birmingham.ac.uk/nop], she led an interdisciplinary, impact-heavy research project into the Crisis of Rhetoric [www.birmingham.ac.uk/cor] in modern British political speech. She is the co-editor (with Harvey Yunis) of the first volume of the forthcoming Cambridge History of Rhetoric, which focuses on the ancient world from the third millennium BC to AD 350, and she is a co-editor (with Catherine Steel, Christa Gray and Richard Marshall) of the forthcoming Fragments of the Roman Republican Orators.

Professor Will Bowden is Associate Professor in Roman Archaeology at the University of Nottingham. His research focuses on urbanism and identity in the Roman and late antique periods. He has been involved in major fieldwork projects in Balkans and the UK, most recently at Venta Icenorum in Norfolk. Major publications include Epirus Vetus: the Archaeology of a Late Antique Province (2003) and Butrint 3: Excavations at the Triconch Palace (2011, with R. Hodges). He is also involved in heritage interpretation projects utilising Virtual Reality and serves as trustee for two community archaeology charities.  

Dr Penny Goodman is Senior Lecturer in Roman History at the University of Leeds, where she has worked since 2006. Her Oxford DPhil thesis was published in 2007 as The Roman City and Its Periphery: From Rome to Gaul, and she has continued working on the spatial dimensions of Roman urbanism ever since. A second research strand on receptions of the emperor Augustus is represented by her 2018 volume, Afterlives of Augustus, AD 14-2014.

Julia Hillner is a Professor of Ancient History at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies. Before moving to Bonn she taught at the University of Manchester and, most recently, as Professor of Medieval History at the University of Sheffield, specialising in late antiquity. Her research interests include the Roman family and the household, gender, crime and punishment and the city of Rome. Her books include Prison, Punishment and Penance in Late Antiquity (CUP 2015). Her latest book is Helena Augusta: Mother of the Empire, which is due to appear with Oxford University Press in 2022.

Prof Christian Laes, professor of ancient history at the University of Manchester, studies  the social and cultural history of Roman and Late Antiquity, paying particular attention to the human life course: childhood, youth, family, sexuality, and disabilities. His monographs and over hundred contributions have been published with internationally renowned publishers and journals. Next to this, he focuses on epigraphy (with an edition of the inscriptions from Grumentum forthcoming), Neo-Latin authors and didactics of Latin and Ancient Greek. He has been part of several international research networks, and is the editor of three Bloomsbury volumes: 'The Cultural History of Disability/ Education/ Youth.'

Elected June 2021

Dr Caroline Barron is Assistant Professor in Classics (Roman History) at Durham University. She is an ancient historian with a particular research interest in Latin epigraphy and its reception, from antiquity to the present day. Caroline completed her PhD at King’s College London in 2015, after which she was a Teaching Fellow at KCL. Following this she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in Aix-Marseille Université, on the ERC-funded 'Judaism and Rome' project, and held a Rome Award at the British School at Rome 2018. Before joining Durham's Department of Classics and Ancient History Caroline was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Birkbeck where she worked on epigraphic forgeries and the 18th century art market. She is a co-editor on the second digital edition of Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania and on the editorial team for the second edition of Roman Statutes.

Caroline Bristow is the Director of the Cambridge School Classics Project, part of the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education and most well known for the creation of the Cambridge Latin Course. In addition to the core work of running CSCP she has a research interest in the pedagogy of social justice, with a focus on the effective, inclusive and trauma informed teaching of narratives involving sexual violence.

Previous to this role she was the Classics and Religious Studies Subject Specialist at the exam board OCR where she led on qualification reform, including working with the Department for Education and Ofqual to develop subject specific guidelines and regulations. 

After graduating from the University of Oxford with a BA in Ancient and Modern History and an MSt in Ancient History Caroline taught a variety of subjects in the UK state sector including Classical Civilisation, Classical Greek, Religious Studies, Philosophy and Anthropology. Each summer she teaches on one of the JSST Summer Schools to get a small 'fix' of classroom time and she is the Non-Executive Director for Education of Innovating Minds, a company working to improve access to clinical mental health support in schools.

Dr Shushma Malik is Senior Lecturer in Classics (Roman History) at the University of Roehampton. Shushma completed her PhD at the University of Bristol in 2013. Before joining Roehampton, she worked at the University of Manchester (2013-2015) and the University of Queensland in Brisbane (2015-17). Her research interests include Roman emperors and their reception, imperial historiography, and political culture. In particular, she has worked extensively on the Emperor Nero’s portrayal in Christian history as the Antichrist, and has written on portrayals of Roman emperors in the literature and letters of Oscar Wilde. Her monograph The Nero-Antichrist: Founding and Fashioning a Paradigm was published in 2020 by Cambridge University Press. She is currently Co-I on an AHRC-DFG funded project at the Universities of Roehampton and Potsdam, “Twisted Transfers”: Discursive Construction of Corruption in Ancient Greece and Rome (2020-23).

Dr Mai Musié is a part-time freelance community engagement practitioner and facilitator and a part-time Public Engagement Manager at the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. She manages a diverse public engagement programme with the Bodleian's collections through exhibitions, special events, and workshops – all designed with schools and communities at the heart of the engagement process. Mai has been a key voice in the UK for engagement with the humanities, and is the co-founder of the Classics in Communities partnership project between the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and The Iris Project (an educational Classics charity). The project aims to promote and encourage the teaching of Latin and Ancient Greek at primary and early secondary school level (and beyond) in UK state schools. Mai has had multiple speaking engagements, written blogs and featured in podcasts on public engagement with the Classics, decoloniality and restitution of art. 

Her research areas tend to focus on race and ethnicity in the ancient world but has a passing interest in medieval manuscripts, particularly from Ethiopian and Eritrean tradition. Mai is the co-editor (with Dr Arlene Holmes-Henderson and Steve Hunt) of the book Forward with Classics: Classical Languages in Schools and Communities , which investigates the motivations of teachers and learners behind the rise of Classics in the classroom and in communities. It also explores the ways in which knowledge pf classical languages is considered valuable for diverse learners in the 21st century. 

Professor Jamie Wood is Professor of History and Education at the University of Lincoln, where he teaches modules on late antiquity and the early medieval period. He joined Lincoln in 2013, having taught previously at Manchester, Sheffield, Warwick and Liverpool in Classics, Ancient History, History and Religions and Theology. He works on the social, cultural and religious history of late antique Spain and Portugal and has published extensively on the writings of Isidore of Seville and the emergence of the episcopacy in post-Roman Hispania. He is currently Co-I on an AHRC-funded project on the cult of the saints in late antique and early medieval Iberia. 

Elected June 2022

Clive Cheesman has been an officer of the College of Arms since 1998. He read classics at Oxford and graduated PhD from the Scuola Superiore di Studi Storici of the University of San Marino with a thesis on Roman onomastics. He was a special assistant and curator in the British Museum, working on Roman and Iron-Age British coinage, and was called to the Bar in 1996. He has taught at Birkbeck and the I.C.S., and is an adviser to the Portable Antiquities Scheme, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and a member of the Working Group on Military Cultural Property Protection. His research interests include onomastics, the history of antiquarianism, and the law of treasure and cultural property.

Elisabeth R. O’Connell is Byzantine World Curator at The British Museum. Her research focuses on aspects of social history and archaeology in Late Antique Egypt. She is editor of Egypt in the First Millennium AD (2014), Abydos in the First Millennium AD (2020), Egypt and empire: The formation of religious identity after Rome (2022) and co-editor of Egypt: Faith after the pharaohs (2015), which accompanied the BM exhibition of the same title (2015 & 2016). She has excavated in Tunisia, Sudan and Egypt, where she co-directed a British Museum expedition (2009 & 2013). She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley (2007).

Andrew Roberts is a historian with English Heritage. Since 2014, he has been producing exhibitions of Roman archaeology, including three museums along Hadrian's Wall. His role also involves engaging the public in Roman history using different media, including podcasts, social media and the web, art programmes and working with volunteers. His researches the presentation of Roman archaeology to diverse audiences, particularly through digital technology. Prior to his work with English Heritage he was a teaching fellow at King's College London where he previously completed his PhD on Alexander the Great and British Political Thought. He is currently working on the production of exhibitions at  Wroxeter and Richborough.

Federico Santangelo is Professor of Ancient History at Newcastle University. He took his first degree at Bologna, where he studied at the Collegio Superiore, and holds a PhD from University College London. He works mainly on the political and intellectual history of the Roman Republic, on Roman religion, on problems of local and municipal administration in the Roman world, and on aspects of the history of classical scholarship. His latest book is La religione dei Romani (Laterza, 2022). He is currently working on two edited volumes: Authority and History: Ancient Models, Modern Questions (with Juliana Bastos Marques, Bloomsbury 2022), and A Community in Transition. Rome between Hannibal and the Gracchi (with Mattia Balbo, OUP 2022). He is Editor of the Open-Access journal History of Classical Scholarship: www.hcsjournal.org.

Dr Marguerite Spoerri Butcher is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Warwick and Research Fellow at the Coin Hoards of the Roman Empire project (Ashmolean Museum), a project she first joined as a Research Assistant in 2016. Previously, she has worked as a museum curator in Switzerland (Musée d’art et d’histoire, Neuchâtel), a lecturer at the American University of Beirut (Lebanon), and a consultant for the École Suisse d’archéologie en Grèce (coin finds from Eretria, on Euboea). Her research interests pertain mainly to Greek and Roman coinage, both imperial and provincial. Her PhD, dedicated to the coinage issued in the province of Asia during the reign of Gordian III (238-244), was published in 2006 as volume VII.1 of the Roman Provincial Coinage series. She is also one of the main authors of volume VII.2 of the same series (From Gordian I to Gordian III: all provinces except Asia), to be published in summer 2022, as well as Griechische Münzen in Winterthur 3, Pamphylien–Mauretanien (published 2021).

Dr Katharine Walker is Director of the Corinium Museum, Visiting Research Fellow in the department of Archaeology and Anthropology at Bournemouth University, and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London. She is also a consultant with Naomi Korn Associates focusing on intellectual property. Previously, Katharine managed the New Forest Heritage Centre where she had also held curatorial roles, run the Christopher Tower New Forest Reference Library, and developed a major digital project. Other previous experience includes managing the archaeological collections at Hengistbury Head and Kingfisher Barn Visitor Centres for BCP Council. Katharine’s primary research interests focus on raw materials, in particular the use and significance of stone in past societies. She enjoys finding creative solutions to complex problems by developing ambitious collaborative partnerships.