Research Associates

Rachel Bryant Davies

Rachel’s research examines the reworking of classical mythology in tragedy and epic for new contexts and audiences, from opera to children’s games. She has focused in particular on the late antique religious adaptations of Greek Tragedy of Ezekiel’s Exagoge (GRBS, 2008) and Christus Patiens (forthcoming in JHS, 2017) and, more recently, on nineteenth-century British classical burlesques and toy theatres. She was a Doctoral Fellow of the Leverhulme-funded Cambridge Victorian Studies Group from 2007-2011 (supervisor: Professor Simon Goldhill), examining the manifold afterlives of the Trojan War myths in nineteenth-century Britain. Her resulting book, Imaginary Cities: Staging the Ruins of Troy and Carthage during the Nineteenth Century, is to be published in CUP’s ‘Classics after Antiquity’ series. Her latest project, ‘Classics at Play: Greco-Roman antiquity in British children’s culture, 1750-1914’ traces how knowledge of the ancient world was repackaged beyond formalised educational settings, with an emphasis on unravelling how toys, games and leisure entertainments (such as theatrical souvenirs and playscripts) interacted with more overtly pedagogical paraphernalia.

Małgorzata Budzowska

Małgorzata is Associate Professor in the Department of Drama and Theatre, University of Lodz in Poland and lecturer at Theatre Academy in Warsaw. She did her doctorate in the Classics Faculty and her MA by the Institute of Contemporary Culture (theatre and drama theory) at Lodz. Her publications include: authored books: Phaedra – Ethics of Emotions in the tragedies of Euripides, Seneca and Racine (Peter Lang 2012), Sceniczne metamorfozy mitu. Teatr polski XXI wieku w perspektywie kulturowej (Stage Metamorphoses of Myth. Polish Theatre of the Twenty-First Century in the Cultural Perspective) (University of Lodz Press 2018); co-authored book Starożytny teatr i dramat w świetle pism scholiastów (Ancient Theatre and Drama in the Work of Scholiasts) (University of Lodz Press 2020), and various articles regarding classical reception in contemporary theatre as well as theatre reviews. Her internship at the APGRD (October 2014- March 2015) involved the management of interdisciplinary research projects and was funded by the Foundation for Polish Science.

Marie-Louise Crawley

Dr. Marie-Louise Crawley is a choreographer, artist researcher and Assistant Professor in Dance and Cultural Engagement at the Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE), Coventry University (UK). Her research interests include dance and museums, and areas of intersection between Classics and Dance Studies such as ancient dance and the performance of epic. Educated at the University of Oxford (B.A., M.St.) and then vocationally trained at the Ecole Marceau in Paris, Marie-Louise began her professional performance career with Ariane Mnouchkine's Théâtre du Soleil (2003-2009) in France then working in the UK as an independent choreographer and dance artist (2009-2015), before returning to academia to undertake her PhD at C-DaRE. Marie-Louise has worked on several large-scale European-funded research projects investigating dance and the heritage sector, and has published widely in Dance Research Journal, Performance Research Journal, and International Journal of Performing Arts and Digital Media among others. She co-edited Art and Dance in Dialogue: Body Space Object (Palgrave, 2020) and is currently working on a new book for Routledge. Marie-Louise is a co-editor of the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices and a Series Editor for Bloomsbury’s Dance in Dialogue book series.

Arabella Currie

Arabella Currie completed her doctorate, supervised by Fiona Macintosh, in 2017. She researched the history of Graeco-Celtic negotiations, tracking the difficult angles between Greek and Celt as found in the scholarly and artistic reconstruction of both traditions, from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. She was particularly interested in how these angles were interrogated in the work of the Irish playwright, J.M. Synge, a crucial and overlooked figure in the story of the Irish reception of Classics. Alongside academic research, she is interested in putting classical reception into practice, having translated and directed several Greek tragedies (including the 2014 Oxford Greek Play) and published a collection of poetry which draws substantially on the classical world (The Divers, Hurst Street Press, 2016).

Cécile Dudouyt

Cécile Dudouyt teaches French-English translation and Translation Studies at the University of Paris 13 (English Faculty, https://pleiade.univ-paris13.fr/profil/cecile-dudouyt/). Her research focuses on early-modern translation practices and the reception of Greek tragedies in France and in England from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. After a first research project on the reception of Sophoclean drama and its impact on early-modern tragedies and theories of the tragic (Sophoclean Revenge, Renaissance and Enlightement re-writings, 2009) she worked on the APGRD translation database, collecting French translations of ancient drama. Beyond comparisons between Antiquity and Modernity, and  between English and French literature, her research explores how French and English receptions of ancient texts interact, combine, and contrast.

Giovanna Di Martino

Giovanna is A. G. Leventis Fellow in Ancient Greek Literature at University College London, working on a research project on early modern translations of ancient Greek drama in Europe, particularly into Italian (1400-1600). It fills a gap in the history of theatre translation theory and practice, of ancient Greek drama, and of the Italian vernacular and Latin as they developed through, and were influenced by, translation practice; it also explores early modern Italian translations comparatively with an eye to French and English translations of the same plays in the same period and does so through theatre practice. She completed her undergraduate (2012) and Master’s (2014) degrees in Classics at the University of Milan and University of Notre Dame (IN), where she wrote a thesis (now a book) on the reception of Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes in the US. She was awarded her doctorate at Oxford (supervisor: Fiona Macintosh), with a project on the reception of Aeschylus’ tragedies in Italy (1550-1960), and was lecturer in Classics at both St Hilda’s (2017-2019) and St Anne’s (2019-2020) colleges as well as Language Instructor at the Classics Faculty and Tutor in Ancient Greek at the Department for Continuing Education. She is part of the APGRD ‘Translating Ancient Drama’ research project and co-host of the APGRD podcast, and is currently collaborating on a project on fascist appropriations of the classics with Eleftheria Ioannidou (Groningen) and Sara Troiani (Trento).

Stephe Harrop

Stephe Harrop is Associate Professor of Drama at Liverpool Hope University. Her teaching and research focuses on contemporary storytelling practices, spoken-word performance, Greek tragedy and classical receptions, and performer training. Stephe’s publications on Greek tragedy include Theorising Performance: Greek Drama, Cultural History and Critical Practice (co-edited with Edith Hall, 2010), and Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor (co-authored with Zachary Dunbar, 2018) which was awarded the ADSA’s prize for best monograph in drama and theatre studies. Stephe also creates work and tours internationally as a storytelling artist, her repertoire playfully entangling ancient and contemporary narratives. Her most recent book is Contemporary Storytelling Performance: Female Artists on Practices, Platforms, Presences (2023). 

Eleftheria Ioannidou

Eleftheria Ioannidou is an Assistant Professor of Theatre/Performance at the University of Groningen. Her research interests lie in the 20th-century adaptation and performance of Greek tragedy. She holds an MA in Theatre Research from Royal Holloway, University of London and a PhD in classics from the University of Oxford. After completing her doctorate, she was a Humboldt Fellow at the Freie Universität, Berlin. She has authored the monograph Greek Fragments in Postmodern Frames: Rewriting Tragedy, 1970-2005 (OUP, 2017) as well as several articles on the relationship between ancient Greek theatre with nationalism and fascism. She is currently co-editing a special issue on performances of antiquity under fascist regimes for Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies and a special issue on the revival of Greek theatre in Fascist Italy for Classical Receptions Journal. She is a research fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) working on the project ‘Performing Classical Visions: Uses of Antiquity in Fascism and Neofascism’. 

Lucy Jackson

Lucy Jackson is Assistant Professor in Classics (Greek Literature) at Durham University. She studied at the universities of Exeter and Oxford, and was a visiting graduate student at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Princeton University, and the University of Sydney. Her first monograph, The Chorus of Drama in the Fourth Century BCE. Presence and Representation was published in 2020 by Oxford University Press. After teaching posts at King’s College London and Balliol College, Oxford, she was Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at King’s College London, researching the Latin translations and versions of Greek drama created and performed in sixteenth-century Europe. She joined the department of Classics and Ancient History in Durham in 2019. She has acted as academic consultant for the Medea at the National Theatre, London (2014), the Oresteia at Shakespeare’s Globe (2015), and the Iliad at the British Museum and Almeida Theatre (2015). Her research focuses on ancient performance culture, in particular choral song and dance performances, and the ways In which Greek drama has been revived, re-formed, and reperformed in the early modern and contemporary worlds.

Micha Lazarus

Micha Lazarus is Senior Lecturer in English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Previously a research fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge (2015-2019), and the Warburg Institute (2020-2021), he has published widely on the intellectual history and literary culture of Renaissance and Reformation Europe, and in particular on the reception of the classics in sixteenth-century England, in numerous leading journals and edited collections. Current work includes Aristotle’s Poetics in Renaissance England, which traces the English influence of the Poetics from as early as the 1540s; Alexander Nowell’s Early Life and Books, an economic microhistory of the mid-Tudor book market based on a Bodleian manuscript; an anthology of translated texts entitled Reformation Literary Criticism; and ongoing work as General Editor (with Vladimir Brljak) of Sources in Early Poetics, a book series published by Brill. He has held fellowships at the Harry Ransom Center, Dumbarton Oaks, the Renaissance Society of America, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Herzog August Bibliothek, has been awarded the Gordon Duff Prize in book history from the Bodleian Library and Cambridge University Libraries, and is a member of the Bar of England & Wales.

Hallie Marshall

Hallie Marshall is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre & Film at the University of British Columbia. Her PhD thesis, on the classical plays of Tony Harrison and the history of performance of classical drama in England, is currently being revised as a monograph. Recent publications include chapters in Ancient Greek Women in Film (Oxford University Press, 2013), No Laughing Matter, Studies in Athenian Comedy (Bristol Classical Press, 2012), and The Blackwell Companion to Sophocles (Blackwell Publishing, 2012). 

Tom Sapsford

Tom Sapsford is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Classical Studies, Boston College and has taught at Bates College in Maine and at the University of Southern California, where he also received his PhD in Classics. He was a 2019 fellow at the Centre for Ballet and the Arts at NYU and has written a book entitled Performing the ‘Kinaidos': Unmanly Men in Ancient Mediterranean Cultures (OUP, 2022). Tom is currently working on a new project entitled Classics and the Gay Counterculture. Prior to pursuing the study of Classics, he was a professional dancer and choreographer working with institutions such as the Royal Ballet, the Royal Opera House, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Tom's academic interests more broadly are ancient and modern performance cultures, contemporary dance and the classical world, and the history of sexuality. He joined the APGRD as a visiting scholar from Michaelmas 2014 to Hilary 2015. 

Helen Slaney

Helen completed her DPhil with the APGRD in 2013 on the performance reception of Senecan tragedy. Supported by a Randall McIver JRF, Helen went on to study the intersection of emotion and human movement in ancient dance, setting up the TORCH network ‘Ancient Dance in Modern Dancers’. From 2014-2016 she held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at St Hilda’s College. The monograph from this fellowship, Moved by Stone: Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750-1820 was published in 2020. Since 2016, Helen has worked in research management and is currently Research Impact Manager at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. She retains a research interest in sensory history and embodied forms of knowledge.

Henry Stead

Henry Stead is Senior Lecturer in Latin at the University of St. Andrews. His research project “Brave New Classics” explores the relationship between the Greek and Roman classics and the international left. He is author of A Cockney Catullus (2015),co-author of A People’s History of Classics (2020) and co-editor of Greek and Roman Classics in the British Struggle for Social Reform (2016) and A Proletarian Classics (2022).

Marchella Ward

Chella is the Tinsley Outreach Fellow at Worcester College (Oxford). She recently completed her doctorate in Classics at Oxford, on blindness in the theatre (both ancient and modern), but had been a frequent visitor to the APGRD study room through her undergraduate degree in Classics and English and her MSt. in Classical Languages and Literature, both from the University of Oxford. She has a chapter on Ted Hughes' and Shakespeare's reworkings of the Pyramus and Thisbe myth from Ovid's Metamorphosesin the APGRD's 2018 volume Epic Performances from the middle ages into the twenty-first century, ed. F. Macintosh, J. McConnell, S. Harrison and C. Kenward (OUP 2018). She has also written on Milton's classical blindness, and on Senecan echoes in the in-yer-face plays of the 1990s. Chella was the APGRD's acting Archivist-Administrator / Researcher in 2017-18. 

Rachael White

Rachael White completed her D.Phil, 'The Man on the Land: Classics in Colonial Australia', under the supervision of Professor Fiona Macintosh in 2017. She researched the reception of Greek and Latin literature in colonial Australia's literary and political culture, with a particular focus on the use of classical texts in laying claim to the Australian landscape. She completed her undergraduate degrees at the University of Adelaide, and an M.St in Greek and Latin Literature at Oxford in 2013. Her M.St thesis explored classical receptions in the works of three Australian poets, Les Murray, Peter Porter, and Judith Wright. She worked at the Archive as Associate Archivist-Administrator from 2017-2018.

Rosie Wyles

Rosie Wyles studied Classics as an undergraduate at Oxford and has been involved with the APGRD since 2004, when she was awarded the AHRC PhD studentship attached to the project on the reception of the tragic canon within antiquity. Her thesis, supervised by Professor Edith Hall and awarded 2007 (University of London), was on costume’s role in the ancient performance reception of Euripides’ Telephus, Heracles and Andromeda. Her research interests include: Greek and Roman performance arts, costume, reception within antiquity and beyond, and gender.She is now lecturer in Classics at the University of Kent, with publications including two monographs on Greek theatre: Costume in Greek Tragedy (2011) and Theatre Props and Civic Identity in Athens 458-405 BC (2020).