Postgraduate training

The department has a unique Taught MA programme [Ancient Visual and Material Culture], including a stream incorporating the Postgraduate City of Rome course at the British School at Rome [Visual and Material Culture of Ancient Rome] and short courses at the British School at Athens [Visual and Material Culture of Ancient Greece], in which students have the opportunity to specialise in Classical Epigraphy.

We regularly visit the British Museum or Ashmolean Museum as part of the course, so that students gain experience of studying inscriptions as monuments and not just as texts. The course is also adapted to suit the linguistic knowledge of the participants: even Beginners in Latin or Ancient Greek can enjoy studying Classical Epigraphy. Our postgraduates have also taken part in the British School at Rome Epigraphy Summer School and the Practical Epigraphy Workshops run by the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents. Taught MA students are eligible to apply to the Institute of Advanced Teaching and Learning for grants to support research beyond the syllabus content for the Taught MA (see report on the project, ‘The display of Greek epigraphical texts in Athenian museums’). Students taking this MA have gone on to complete PhD theses on Epigraphy Between Manuscript and Print in Southern Europe, 1521-1603; Inscribing Flavian Rome: Epigraphic Strategies of Martial’s Epigrams; The Inscribed Sculptures of Archaic Greece; A Crisis of Consensus: The Epigraphic Representation of Imperial Power in the Latin-speaking West, AD 180-235. Please contact Prof Alison Cooley for further information.

Current research projects and collaborative work

Alison Cooley has recently completed a new edition and commentary of the senatorial decree concerning Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso, a dramatic account of the penalties imposed upon Piso by the Senate following his trial for maiestas in AD 20: The Senatus Consultum de Cn. Pisone Patre (CUP, 2023). Her entry on 'Latin Epigraphy' for the Oxford Classical Dictionary (Digital Edition) is currently in press. She is a member of the research team Roman Statutes: Renewing Roman Law, led by Clifford Ando (Chicago), working on the Lex Libitina from Puteoli and the leges passed in honour of Germanicus and Drusus. She is joint series editor, with Andrew Meadows, of Oxford Studies in Ancient Documents (Oxford University Press). The series includes the following recent volumes: Languages and Communities in the Late-Roman and Post-Imperial Western Provinces (edited by Alex Mullen and Geogre Woudhuysen) (2023); Social Factors in the Latinization of the Latin West (edited by Alex Mullen) (2023); The Material Dynamics of Festivals in the Graeco-Roman East (edited by Zahra Newby) (2023). She is a member of the advisory board for the following research projects: 'Latin Now: Latinization of the north-west provinces – sociolinguistics, epigraphy, and archaeology' (PI Alex Mullen); 'Crossreads: Text, materiality and multiculturalism at the crossroads of the ancient Mediterranean' (PI Jonathan Prag). She is a member of the advisory board of the Urbana Species series published by Quasar, and is President of the British Epigraphy Society. Most recently, she has been collaborating on the use of 3-D imaging in cultural heritage and education with Paul Wilson of Warwick Manufacturing Group, using the Chichester Tablet as a case-study: (2022) 'Reverse-engineering history: re-presenting the Chichester tablet using laser scanning and 3D printing', Studies in Conservation (YSIC) 68.8: 773-83 (with P.F. Wilson, M. Donnelly, E. King, M.A. Williams).

Naomi Carless Unwin has worked for many years on the epigraphy of Asia Minor, with a focus on the region of Karia. Her recent monograph, Karia and Krete in Antiquity: Cultural Interaction between Anatolia and the Aegean (CUP, 2017) examined the relationship between south-western Asia Minor and the island in the longue durée, with particular attention paid to the insights of epigraphy during the Hellenistic period. Her current research project, the Materiality of Festival Culture in the Graeco-Roman East, is focused on the epigraphy of Greece and Asia Minor in the Roman Imperial period, exploring what inscriptions can reveal in terms of the conduct of ancient festivals, and how they were used as monuments to shape civic and religious space. Naomi has also been involved in the excavations at Labraunda in south-western Turkey since 2009, with a concentration on the epigraphy of the site; she co-authored the publication of a new Hellenistic inscription from the sanctuary in 2016.

Recent publications in epigraphy

• Carless Unwin, N. (forthcoming) ‘Festivals’, in A. Heller and M. Hallmannsecker (eds), Oxford Handbook of Greek Cities in the Roman Empire (Oxford University Press)

• Carless Unwin, N. with O. Henry (forthcoming) ‘A New Maussollos Inscription from Labraunda’, Epigraphica Anatolica.
• Cooley, A.E. (in press) 'Control: The destruction of monuments', in D. Agri and S. Lewis (eds) Cultural History of Media: Antiquity (Bloomsbury)
• Cooley, A.E. (in press) 'Latin epigraphy' Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. T. Whitmarsh (Digital edition: New York: Oxford University Press)
• Newby, Z. (ed.) (2023) The Material Dynamics of Festivals in the Graeco-Roman East (Oxford Studies in Ancient Documents: OUP)
• Cooley, A.E. (2023) The Senatus Consultum de Cn. Pisone patre. Text, translation, and commentary (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge)
• Cooley, A.E. (2023) 'The role of the non-elite in spreading Latin in Roman Britain', in A. Mullen (ed.) Social Factors in the Latinization of the Roman West (Oxford: Oxford Studies in Ancient Documents, Oxford University Press) 99-116

• Carless Unwin, N. (2023) ‘Epigraphy and the Power of Precedence in Asia Minor’, in E. Angliker and I. Bultrighini (eds.), Materiality of Texts in Greco-Roman Antiquity (Brepols): 127-140.

• Carless Unwin, N. (2023) ‘An Epigraphic Stage: inscriptions and the moulding of festival space at Aphrodisias’, in Z. Newby (ed.), The material, visual and spatial dynamics of ancient festivals in the imperial Greek east (Oxford University Press): 179-213.

• Cooley, A.E. (2022) 'Reverse-engineering history: re-presenting the Chichester tablet using laser scanning and 3D printing', Studies in Conservation (YSIC) 68.8: 773-83 (with P.F. Wilson, M. Donnelly, E. King, M.A. Williams)
• Cooley, A.E. (2022) 'Bretagne', Année Epigraphique 2019: 403-17
• Cooley, A.E. (2021) ‘Bretagne’, Année Epigraphique 2018: 393-408