A few months ago, at a restaurant in Central Edinburgh, I made the acquaintance of a family from ‘near Preston’. When I mentioned later in the conversation that I studied Classics they were more precise: Ribchester, a former Roman fort. Flash forward to last weekend and me and my long-suffering girlfriend are hopping on local… Read More Seeking the Sarmatians: A Trip to Brementennacum
As mentioned in my previous post, I am co-organising a second seminar series this term. Do get in touch if you would like to attend any of these talks.
I have the pleasure of co-organising not one, but two, excellent seminar series this academic year: The Postgraduate Research Seminars for the University of Edinburgh School of History, Classics and Archaeology and those of the Pandemic Perspectives group. While the former is generally for an internal audience (although do get in touch if you want… Read More Pandemic Perspectives Autumn Seminar Series 2021-22
An hour’s drive north of Edinburgh, in the Kingdom of Fife, sits Wemyss (pronounced Weems), a small town on the coast of the North Sea, home to Scotland’s (and thus the world’s) largest collection of Pictish carvings. These are found in a series of caves on what on was once the shoreline, but has now… Read More Puttin’ on the Picts: A Trip to Wemyss Caves
‘Alright, well. I had a tracked version of this that we already mastered, and then it turned out there was a mysterious seven-and-a-half-second gap in the other one. All hail the mysterious gap!’ So opens track two of Songs for Pierre Chuvin, the eighteenth studio album by the American Alternative/Indie group The Mountain Goats. The… Read More ‘One summer, then all of this is gone’: Lyrics, Lockdown, and Late Antiquity
Hollywood’s Hephaestus: Review of Ray Harryhausen: Titan of Cinema exhibition at Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two), from Sat 24 Oct 2020 – Sun 5 Sep 2021.
Given that I am now on my fourth degree, this is perhaps a topic in which my observations have some validity. Here are a few, in no particular order: Online conferences are fine, not great, but fine. Let’s talk first about the positives. Online attendance is vastly more practical and – has the potential to… Read More Some Thoughts on Academia Post-Lockdown
The British Museum, which traditionally uses its summer months to display a wide-ranging, easy-to-follow main exhibition focused on a topic popular with laymen both British and from abroad (cf Pompeii and Herculaneum, Ming Dynasty China and Vikings), seems to have gone a little off-piste this year. A display, I kid you not, curated by Ian… Read More Snowflakes Beware: Review of Rodin and the art of ancient Greece at the British Museum
As a grad student, I wrote a study of the Tiberius Cup, now in the Louvre, originally found in the silver hoard of a villa at Boscoreale, near Pompeii. The cup depicts a triumph of the (future) Emperor Tiberius, and is the only known realistic depiction of this archetypal Roman event in the whole corpus… Read More Anti-clockwise; Power and Protection: Islamic Art and the Supernatural at the Ashmolean Museum
whoyayaya 