Classical Epigraphy

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.

Current postgraduate projects which incorporate an epigraphic component include:

• Imperial women of the Third Century 
• Understanding Power and Post-Truth Politics in the Age of Nerva and Trajan 
• Epigraphic Collections and the Roman Antiquarian Market in 18th-Century Italy: The Role of Scipione Maffei (1675-1755)
• Empire and the Dynamics of Local Identity in Roman Baetica, 50 BC - AD 212
• Cultural Memories in Rome’s Fora
• Creating the past and the future in Roman private funerary portraiture. Representation and identity in Rome 50 BCE - 100 CE
• From 'pagans' to Christians
• Funerary commemoration of Roman auxiliary troops 

EPIGRAPHIC PUBLICATIONS BY POSTGRADUATES

• Carlos Enriquez de Salamanca (2024) 'The Emergence of the Replica Model? An Analysis of the Question of the ‘Copies of Rome’ in Late Republican Colonization Through Three Case-Studies', Studia Antiqua et Archaeologica 30(1): 117-138

• Ludovico M. Bevilacqua (2024) 'Le iscrizioni latine urbanae del Museo Maffeiano (CIL V 429*, 1-160; 234): giudizio autoptico di Mommsen e ricostruzione delle provenienze', Epigraphica 86

Please contact Prof Alison Cooley for further information.

Current research projects and collaborative work

Alison Cooley's latest monograph is an 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). Publications for 2025 include 'Latin epigraphy', in the Oxford Classical Dictionary; ‘An ash-chest in an English country-garden: EDCS 65000025 revisited’, in A. Kolb, M. Speidel (eds), A new era of epigraphy: 40 years of Epigraphic database of Clauss/Slaby (De Gruyter 239-46); 'Contextualizing ancient texts with generative neural networks', Nature 2025-07-23 with Yannis Assael, Thea Sommerschield, et al..

Most recently, she has been collaborating on the use of 3-D imaging in cultural heritage and education with Paula Wilson and Mike Donnelly 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). They are currently working on the 'ghost inscription' in the Colosseum, a dedicatory inscription that survives only in the form of its dowel holes.

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: Corpus of Ptolemaic Inscriptions (2025); Greek Personal Names in Egypt (2025); Latinization, Local Languages and Literacies in the Roman West (2024); The Uley Tablets (2024). She is a member of the advisory board for the 'Crossreads: Text, materiality and multiculturalism at the crossroads of the ancient Mediterranean' (ERCA Advanced Grant, PI Jonathan Prag). She is President of the British Epigraphy Society.

Zahra Newby works on the visual and material culture of the Graeco-Roman world. She has particular interests in the intersection of art and epigraphy (Z. Newby/R. Leader-Newby eds., Art and Inscriptions in the Ancient World, CUP 2007) and the materiality of inscribed monuments. She was PI of the Leverhulme Trust Research Project, The Materiality of Graeco-Roman Festivals (2017-2021) which studied the active roles played by inscriptions, art and coinage in the experience of festivals in the eastern provinces of the Roman empire, and edited the volume, The Material Dynamics of Festivals in the Graeco-Roman East (OUP, 2023).

Naomi Carless Unwin has worked for many years on the epigraphy of Asia Minor, with a focus on the region of Karia. Her first 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. As research fellow on the Leverhulme Trust research project, the Materiality of Graeco-Roman Festivals she 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 and is currently preparing a monograph on this theme. 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.

Eris Williams Reed studies the lived experience of environmental change, bringing ancient inscriptions into dialogue with modern ecological thinking about the emotional and social impact of ecological devastation and loss. One way in which she explores this theme is by examining the graffiti of nomadic pastoralists through the concept of ‘ecological grief’.

Recent publications in epigraphy

• Cooley, A.E. (in press) 'Control: The destruction of monuments', in D. Agri and S. Lewis (eds) Cultural History of Media: Antiquity (Bloomsbury)
• 'Contextualizing ancient texts with generative neural networks', Nature 2025-07-23 - Yannis Assael, Thea Sommerschield, Alison Cooley, Brendan Shillingford, John Pavlopoulos, Priyanka Suresh, Bailey Herms, Justin Grayston, Benjamin Maynard, Nicholas Dietrich, Robbe Wulgaert, Jonathan Prag, Alex Mullen, Shakir Mohamed Link opens in a Link opens in a new window
• Cooley, A.E. (2025) ‘An ash-chest in an English country-garden: EDCS 65000025 revisited’. In A. Kolb, M. Speidel, (eds.) A new era of epigraphy: 40 years of Epigraphic database of Clauss/Slaby. De Gruyter 239-46
• Cooley, A.E. (2025) 'Latin epigraphy' Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. T. Whitmarsh (Digital edition: New York: Oxford University Press - https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199381135.013.2451)

• Carless Unwin, N. (2024) ‘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 (2024) ‘A New Maussollos Inscription from Labraunda’, Epigraphica Anatolica
• Newby, Z. (2024) ‘Athletes in the City: the Dynamics of Inscribed Victory Statues in Roman Asia Minor’, Nikephoros 30: 91-124.
• Williams Reed, E. (2024) 'Ecological Grief and the Safaitic Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia' in E. Eidinow and C. Schliephake (eds), Conversing with Chaos in Graeco-Roman Antiquity. Writing and Reading Environmental Disorder in Ancient Texts
• 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 dynamics of festivals in the Graeco-Roman 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
• Carless Unwin, N. (2021) ‘The epigraphic curve in Phrygia and its borderlands’, in K. Nawotka ed., Epigraphic Culture in the Eastern Mediterranean in Antiquity. 144-65