About

After studying Classics at Downing College, Cambridge (MA), I spent a year at Harvard on a Kennedy Scholarship, where I combined classes in Roman art and literature with history of art, Shakespeare, museum studies, and fine art. I then spent seven years in corporate law and Classics teaching, before heading to Corpus Christi, Oxford in 2016 to study for my master’s and then my doctorate, which I wrote on encounters with death in the art and literature of Classical Athens under the supervision of Felix Budelmann and Jaś Elsner. In 2020 I was awarded a Christopher Tower Junior Research Fellowship in Greek Mythology at Christ Church, Oxford. I joined the University of Warwick in 2024 as an Assistant Professor of Classical Languages and Literature.

Research interests

I work on art and literature from the Graeco-Roman world with interest in the generative role played by cultural artefacts in processes of thought and imagination. My publications in The Journal of Roman StudiesLink opens in a new window (2023) and with Routledge, The Imagination of the Mind in Classical AthensLink opens in a new window (2024, as co-editor with Xavier Buxton), focused respectively on imperial Rome and Classical Athens.

My first monograph, Figuring Death in Classical Athens: Visual and Literary EncountersLink opens in a new window is due out with OUP in March 2025. The book looks at how art and literature helped ancient Greeks grapple with some of humanity’s biggest questions: what is death? what is it like? how can we know? Death is something that everyone must face but that no one can try out in advance… Or can they? Pulling together a variety of objects and texts, I examine how they challenged their audience to think about the mystery of death. Key themes are distance (can the living know what death is like from the outside?) and particularity (is death truly a leveller?).

I am currently working on two papers on visuality in Greek tragedy and one bringing theories of photography to bear upon the deathbed scene in classical art and beyond. I am also embarking upon a novel set in Classical Athens.

Publications

Book

Clifford, E. 2025. Figuring Death in Classical Athens: Visual and Literary Encounters. Oxford University Press: Oxford.

Co-edited volume

Clifford, E. and X. Buxton (eds) 2024. The Imagination of the Mind in Classical Athens: Forms of Thought. London.

Articles and chapters

Clifford, E. 2024. ‘Identity Politics: Greek-Style’. Omnibus, 87: 4–6.

Clifford, E. 2024. ‘Imagining Death with Painted Pots’. In The Imagination of the Mind, 199–229.

Clifford, E. and X. Buxton 2024. ‘Introduction’. In The Imagination of the Mind, 1–51.

Clifford, E. 2023. ‘Death by Analogy: Identity Crises on a Roman Sarcophagus’. The Journal of Roman Studies, 113: 107–36.

Teaching and supervision

• Equality and Diversity (member of the Department Inclusion Committee)

• Department Student Experience

• Greek Drama Festival