We Are a Proud Professional Mother

Our Earlier Book

I have magnificent news. My collaborator on my Classics and Class project, and co-author of the forthcoming A People’s History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain, has been appointed at St Andrews as Lecturer in Latin. I am ecstatic. Henry Stead is a wonderful person as well as an outstanding young intellectual and I am exploding with metaphorically maternal pride.

I’m too delirious to write anything but a boasting love letter to all my Post-Docs and Research students who have kept in touch. They are not my biological children so I do not fear the fate of Niobe. Helping to look after you all has been one of the biggest pleasures and privileges of my life.

Dr Lucy Jackson, Utterly Brilliant

The brilliant Lucy Jackson, who is completing a Leverhulme Post-Doc on Renaissance translations of Greek tragedy, is also about to go off to a permanent appointment at my old stomping-ground, the University of Durham. The astounding Arlene Holmes-Henderson is co-writing a book with me, Teaching Classical Civilisation and Ancient History in Britain at KCL and co-running our ACE campaign to get Greeks and Romans to every British teenager.

More than a quarter of a century ago, at Reading, there were Kim Shahabudin (now Teaching Fellow there), Andrea Bolton (who teaches Classics at Portsmouth Grammar School) and Ruth Bardel, who made a fine career in TEFL. At Durham, the dancing Alessandra Zanobi wrote her elegant thesis/book on ancient pantomime dancing and Emma Bridges her dazzling study of Xerxes co-supervised with Peter Rhodes (Emma’s now ICS Public Engagement Fellow in Classics) as well as the co-edited Cultural Responses to the Persian Wars. 

It was at Durham that Rosie Wyles began her splendid work on Greek tragedy (she now lectures at Kent Uni and has done THREE books with me as well as her own), Leanne Hunnings began her PhD on slavery (she’s an International Education Analyst), as did Laura Proffitt (who co-edited Reading Ancient Slavery with me and Richard Alston).

These last three passed their doctorates at Royal Holloway, where I also supervised Justine McConnell, now a trailblazing lecturer in Comparative Literature at KCL, who's done two books with me besides her pathbreaking Black Odysseys, Daniel Goad, a successful administrator at LSE, where no doubt being an expert on the Aristophanic Absurd throws light on the strange workings of academe, David Bullen, Theatre Director and Lecturer, and Jarrid Looney, who teaches Classics and English at Uwharrie Charter Academy.

At KCL I’ve made a point of supervising excellent mature and part-time PhDs students, including Matthew Shipton (a mountaineer when not Head of Comms at City Uni, London), Caroline Latham (an unnervingly intelligent star, older even than me, who’s done wonderful indexes for Women Classical Scholars and New Light on Tony Harrison), Miryana Dimitrova (freelance translator), Etta Chatterjee (an international lawyer),  Lottie Parkyn (now Director for Academic Engagement at Notre Dame London), Oliver Baldwin (world’s greatest expert on Seneca in Spain), Devan Turner (a university administrator), Anactoria Clarke (Curriculum Innovator at the Open University) and Magdalena Zira (one of Cyprus’ top theatre directors).

There are also two famous theatre directors amongst my past KCL PhD full-timers, Helen Eastman (an outstanding writer too) and Leonidas Papadopoulos, who wrote a lyrical thesis on Greek Tragedy and the Sea. Currently on the books full-time are Nimisha Patel (whose insights into contemporary Indian education never cease to stagger me) Peter Swallow (with whom I’m co-editing Aristophanic Humour) and Connie Bloomfield (with whom I’m convening a conference on Time in Greek Literature in September). Hardeep Dhindsa is soon to join me to research all those ridiculously pale Greek gods and heroes in 18th-century British neoclassical art.

Two students whose Masters' Level dissertations I supervised are now leading lights of their academic departments, Dr Emma Cole at Bristol and Professor Matthew Wright at Exeter. Many other wonderful junior colleagues (Stephe Harrop, once post-doc at the APGRD I co-founded at Oxford and with whom I edited Theorising Performance, now Senior Lecturer in Drama & Theatre at Liverpool Hope Uni) and students have laughed and cried with me in my many offices (Marcus Bell!), but this is already a long blog. Here are just some of the books which my babies have produced. (The software won't let my load any more). They have also had lots of their own real babies, theatrical productions, glamorous weddings, and other exciting tales to tell.