Elected June 2024
Dr Victoria Leonard is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities at Coventry University. She joined the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London, as a Research Associate in 2017, and became a Research Fellow in 2020. Victoria’s research focuses on the Roman and Late Roman western Mediterranean, with a special interest in historiography, ancient religion, and gender, sexuality, violence, and theories of the body in antiquity. She is the author of In Defiance of History: Orosius and the Unimproved Past (2022) and co-editor of Bodily Fluids in Antiquity (2021). Her media work includes writing for The Guardian and The Times Higher Education, and she has contributed to BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking.
Dr Luke Houghton is Lecturer in Latin at the University of Edinburgh. His research concentrates primarily on the reception of Roman poetry in later art and literature, especially during the later Middle Ages and early Renaissance. He is the author of Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue in the Italian Renaissance (2019) and has co-edited four volumes: Perceptions of Horace (with Maria Wyke, 2009), Neo-Latin Poetry in the British Isles (with Gesine Manuwald, 2012), Virgil and Renaissance Culture (with Marco Sgarbi, 2018), and An Anthology of British Neo-Latin Literature (with Gesine Manuwald and Lucy Nicholas, 2020). He is editor of Proceedings of the Virgil Society, and his translation of Marco Girolamo Vida’s influential sixteenth-century Latin epic, the Christiad, is in preparation for the Oxford World’s Classics series.
Dr Adam Rogers is an academic at the University of Leicester that specialises in Roman archaeology. His research and teaching focuses particularly on the Roman West and Britain in the Roman era. He also has interests in urbanism and settlement in the Roman period, landscapes, materiality and hoards, historiography and archaeological theory. He has published a number of books on his research including Late Roman Towns in Britain: Rethinking Change and Decline (Cambridge University Press 2011), Water and Roman Urbanism: Towns, Waterscapes, Land Transformation and Experience in Roman Britain (Brill 2013), The Archaeology of Roman Britain: Biography and Identity (Routledge 2015), Iron Age and Roman Coin Hoards in Britain (co-authored, Oxbow Books 2020) and Roman Towns (Amberley 2023).
James King-Smith is a retired barrister who read Literae Humaniores at St. John's College, Oxford, matriculating in 1973. James' special subject in Latin literature was the poet Horace and he is currently a member of the Horatian Society.
Micaela Langellotti is Senior Lecturer in Ancient History at Newcastle University. Her research focuses on the social, cultural and economy history of Egypt under Roman rule. She is the author of Village Life in Roman Egypt. Tebtunis in the First Century AD (OUP 2020) and the co-editor of Village Institutions in Egypt in the Roman to the Early Arab period (with D.W. Rathbone, OUP 2020). She is currently preparing the first edition of an archive of Greek documents written on papyrus which were produced at a local notary office in the Roman Fayum, Egypt. She is on the editorial board of the book series Pragmateiai, Edipuglia, specialising in the socio-economic history of the ancient world.
Elected June 2023
Professor Rebecca Langlands is Professor of Classics at the University of Exeter, with research specialisms in Latin literature, Roman cultural history, ethics and exemplarity, sexuality and gender, and reception of the classical world. Her books include Sexual Morality in Ancient Rome (2006), Sex, Knowledge, and Receptions of the Past (edited with Kate Fisher, 2015), Exemplary Ethics in Ancient Rome (2018) and Literature and Culture in the Roman Empire, 96-235. Cross-Cultural Interactions (edited with Alice König and James Uden, 2020). She is founder and co-director of two interdisciplinary research centres, the Sexual Knowledge Unit and the Centre for Classical Reception. She is also founder and director of the award-winning Sex & History project, which develops innovative sex education resources based on historical materials, and informs practice and policy throughout the UK and worldwide.
Dr Ellen O’Gorman is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Bristol and Director of the Bristol Institute for Greece, Rome, and the Classical Tradition. She works on the literature, politics, and culture of Rome in the 1st-2nd century AD; her current project seeks to understand the rhetorical use of sententiae as aesthetic objects which disseminate thought. Recent publications include her monograph on Tacitus’ History of Politically Effective Speech, the new Oxford Classical Dictionary entry on the historian Tacitus, and an article on ‘Embedded Speech and the Embodied Speaker in Roman Historiography’.
Costas Panayotakis is Professor of Latin at the University of Glasgow. He researches on fragmentary Roman comic drama (especially mime and Atellane comedy) and Latin fiction, and is author of Theatrum Arbitri: Theatrical Elements in the Satyrica of Petronius (Leiden, 1995) and Decimus Laberius: The Fragments (Cambridge, 2010). He is currently preparing critical editions (with facing translation and commentary) of the fragments of Atellane comedy, the sayings (sententiae) associated with the mimographer Publilius, and the episode from Petronius’ Satyricon known as ‘Dinner at Trimalchio’s’.
Dr Hannah Platts is a Senior Lecturer in Ancient History and Archaeology at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her main research focuses on Roman domestic space, whilst a second strand of study examines multisensory experiences of the past. Her most recent book Multisensory Living in Ancient Rome: Power and Space in Roman Houses (pub. Bloomsbury 2019) explores the role of the bodily sensations of smell, sound, taste and touch, as well as sight, in Roman houses. An important aspect of Hannah’s interest in multisensory history examines how embodied experience at historic and heritage sites can help widen visitor access to the past whilst also giving audiences the opportunity to explore history from different perspectives. To explore these questions, Hannah has collaborated on numerous projects exploring the roles of immersive digital technologies (including virtual reality and augmented reality) and multisensory experience in the heritage and museum sector.
James Renshaw teaches Classics at Godolphin and Latymer School in Hammersmith, which offers all four classical A Levels in the 6th form as well as IB Latin and Greek. He also runs the school’s Ancient World Breakfast Club, a community project which provides a weekly talk during term-time, and which is open to any member of the public. As well as teaching, James has written a number of educational textbooks, and is the general editor for the OCR/Bloomsbury suite of endorsed textbooks for the Ancient History and Classical Civilisation qualifications at GCSE and A Level. He has also worked for the OCR exam board as a marker and trainer in Ancient History, Classical Civilisation, and Latin, and is currently the OCR trainer for Ancient History A Level.
Dr Claire Stocks holds a lectureship for Literary Culture and Heritage at the University of Amsterdam. Prior to this, she was Senior Lecturer for Classics at the University of Newcastle (2016-2023), and held lectureships at Radboud University, Nijmegen (2012-2016) and the University of Manchester (2011-2012). Her research centres on two main areas: Roman literature, culture and memory studies and digital humanities (especially games) with a particular focus on how audiences conceptualize the past. Most recently she has worked with the Vindolanda Trust and Creative Assembly (makers of the Total War video game series) to produce the web-based game and online exhibition 'Vindolanda Adventure' (https://www.vindolanda.com/vindolanda-adventure). She was also the co-curator for an exhibition on the Emperor Domitian ('God on Earth: Emperor Domitian') in the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden, December 2021 - May 2022, and in Rome, Capitoline Museums, July 2022 - January 2023.
Emma Stuart is Museum Director at the Corinium Museum but has been employed in various roles at the museum since 2008. Her focus at the museum has been the Roman Mosaics and she now has a portfolio of five lectures on this topic and re-issued the Mosaics Guidebook in June 2022. Prior to working at the Corinium Museum, she worked as Heritage Officer for Chester City Council manging an extensive photographic archive and celebrating the Roman heritage of the City, alongside other periods. During this time she assisted Keith Matthews on a summer dig at the amphitheatre and Mary Lewry with the City’s Summer and Winter Watch parades. Her academic background includes a degree in Theology and World Religions, a Masters Degree in Landscape History and a Masters Degree in Museum Studies, each contributing to the career path she follows today. Emma has had a small number of TV appearances including interviews sharing the stunning archaeological collections in the Corinium Museum on Points West, Bargain Hunt and Antiques Road Trip.
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).