Blog

  • Re-reading these childish things

    Again and it seems I’m writing anything but my thesis. Although that’s not quite true – I’ve about double the amount of words I’m allowed for the upgrade hurdle that all PhD candidates must clear to get from MPhil to PhD status.* Until I can sort this out I find I’m bursting with wanting to… Read more

  • A jocular and political tale in which a blogger may be digressing out of her depth

    As I continue to study for a doctorate, I’m uncomfortably aware of how little I know about most things outside my field. So much so that it feels almost wrong to stray away from my subject and write about three stories that have become national news: a Labour MP who disrespected a working-class man; a… Read more

  • 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