Classics and Ancient History MPhil, PhD

Classics and Ancient History PhD and MPhil supervision is usually available in:

Ancient history and classical archaeology

• Archaeology of religion and ritual from the Bronze Age to the early Classical era
• Greco–Roman religion
• Greek ethnography
• Late Classical and Hellenistic periods: Alexander the Great and Hellenistic empires; kingship and royal ideology
• Contact and interaction between Greeks and non-Greeks
• The history and archaeology of pre-Roman and Roman Italy
• The late Roman Republic
• Institutions of the Roman world
• The social, economic and cultural history of the Roman Empire
• Roman Greece
• Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt
• The era of the tetrarchy and Constantine
• Pagan-Christian relations
• Late Roman/early mediaeval legal history
• Slavery in the ancient world
• Greek art and archaeology

Classical language and literature

• Greek poetry from Homer to the imperial age
• ‘Presocratic’ and ‘Hippocratic’ writers
• Greek tragedy, including its reception
• Ancient didactic poetry
• Second Sophistic
• Ancient linguistic thought, especially etymology
• Greek influence on later literature
• Greek and Roman music, including harmonic theory; instruments and their place in the development of Greek musical science; music and Graeco-Roman society; the representation of musical instruments.
• Greek and Roman oratory and rhetoric
• Cicero: rhetoric, philosophy, politics
• Latin poetry
• Literature and religion in Latin epic
• Time in ancient literature
• Flavian literature and culture
• Ancient historiography
• History of Classical Scholarship
• Reception of the ancient world

Philosophy and science

• Ancient philosophy, particularly epistemology and ethics,
• The exact sciences in Greek and Roman antiquity
• The history of Greek and Roman medicine
• Hippocratic medicine and the history of its reception up until the 20th century

You can find a detailed list of our Classics and Ancient History research areas.