Blog

  • Edit-on dudes: #ClassicsWomen are into Wikipedia

    This week, after a lot of planning and persuading people to get involved, I ran a Wikipedia editathon to create and improve the pages of women who have been important to classics disciplines. (And I mean disciplines – philology, archaeology, history, ancient theatre, epigraphy, numismatics – the list goes on.) The idea came about after… Read more

  • Escaping the heat? Kenwood House’s dairy

    On Sunday, wanting to escape both research and the furnace-blast of London’s heat-wave, I walked through the woods at Kenwood House, recently of Hollywood fame as home to Dido Belle, daughter of a slave, Maria – and niece of the house’s owner, thus making more than usually visible the slavery that funded such colonial mansions.… Read more

  • Of childbirth and curses – a trip to Norwich museum

    A short while back I met up with my Granny to go to ‘Roman Empire: Power and People’, a much-publicised exhibition that is stopping off at Norwich Castle Museum as part of its UK tour. The exhibition was as showy as you might expect, with star artefacts ranging from sculpture from Hadrian and Tiberius’ villas… Read more

  • ‘Made in translation’ (or gloomily lamenting lost languages)

    Went last night to the excellent ‘Sappho in the City’; came home to a pile of catch-up editing for Wikipedia.* In an odd coincidence, translation was at the heart of both these activities. (Even if Josephine Balmer’s translation of Sappho from the Aeolic Greek is to my bashing out a Wikipedia summary of a modern… Read more

  • Absent or absenting? Archaeology, women and Wikipedia

    Sometimes I think archaeology is a bit like a jigsaw puzzle – one that’s missing half the bits and with no picture on the lid to tell you what it should look like.  As well as worrying about the bits you find, you also have to think about the enormous number – perhaps the majority… Read more

  • Trig Lane trip

    Another FROG trip today, less formal than Greenwich, just three of us catching the early low tide to see what the foreshore by Trig Lane riverstairs was up to. This stretch of the river is quite different to Greenwich – there’s a good account of it on the Thames Discovery Programme website. We spent some… Read more