Dr Eris Williams Reed

Email: eris.williams-reed@warwick.ac.uk

Honorary Research Fellow

About

I gladly left school with vocational qualifications and then later completed an Open University course in ancient history. I went on to study for a BA in Archaeology and Ancient Civilisations (2012) in the Department of Archaeology at Durham University, before moving across the city to Durham’s Department of Classics and Ancient History, where I studied for a MA in Greece, Rome and the Near East (2013) and then a PhD in Classics (2018). I stayed in Durham during 2018/19, where I was a Teaching Assistant and an Impact Assistant in the Department of Classics and Ancient History, as well as Research Coordinator to the Centre for Visual Arts and Culture. I spent two much-loved years at Warwick, firstly as Teaching Fellow in Roman History (2019/20) and then as Senior Teaching Fellow in Roman History and Epigraphy (2020/21). Since then, I have worked at Newcastle University, the Science Museum and Wellcome Collection, where I embedded Participatory Action Research as a practice of co-creating knowledge in coalition with communities to confront injustices within collections and enact alternative futures.

I was previously Disability Liaison Officer for the Women's Classical Committee (2018-2022) and a member of the CUCD EDI Committee (2020-2025). I support of the Network for Working-Class Classicists (2020-), with whom I co-authored the UK Class in Classics Report 2024. I am also a member of the AHRC's Peer Review College (2022-), offering expertise in the environmental humanities, museums and galleries, and impact and public engagement. In 2026, I was appointed to the Museums for Climate Justice Steering GroupLink opens in a new window.

Research

My academic research has largely focused on ancient environmental history and specialised in the communities on the ‘edges’ of the Roman world. My research engages with contemporary theories of climate justice, focusing on the lived experience of ancient environments and their entanglement in diachronic colonial histories. I am also an established museum researcher and practitioner, specialising in community-led Participatory Action Research to challenge colonial, racist, ableist and sexist legacies in museums and archives.

My current major research project, The Nature of the Near East: Environments and their Religious Communities in the Roman Empire, mobilises and expands the methodology of environmental history to disentangle the study of religious life in the Roman Near East from the perceived ‘otherness’ of the region’s environments and communities. Environmental history, I argue, proactively foregrounds the lived experiences of these religious communities within the environments they valued, as well as recovering them from a position of historic marginalisation. I am due to publish a case study on the Sacred Grove of Tadmor-Palmyra, which uses environmental history to trace the long-histories and legacies of eco-orientalism in our understanding of the city and its peoples. This project builds on my AHRC-funded doctorate on water and religious life, which is free to download here.

Another strand of my research centres on the lived experience of environmental change, which brings ancient inscriptions into dialogue with modern ecological thinking about the emotional and social impact of ecological devastation and loss. This work was published in 2024, ‘Ecological grief and the Safaitic inscriptions of ancient north Arabia’, which examines the graffiti of nomadic pastoralists through the concept of ‘ecological grief’. Click here for a video of me discussing this project in 2020 as part of Warwick's Faculty of Arts at Home video series. I was also a member of the AHRC Research Network, Environmental Emotions: Theory, Testimony, Politics (2022-2025).

Another area of my research concerns museums and archives, particularly their histories and the stories we tell (or don't tell) about their collections. At Warwick, I created a new module, Stories of Objects, which focused on how and why the stories told by and about ancient objects change throughout their lives and afterlives. At Wellcome Collection, I co-led two research projects in collaboration with community groups and coalitions:

LGBTQ+ Gynae Stories, in partnership with a group of LGBTQ+ people with lived experience of gynaecological healthcare inequity; Julia Nurse, a specialist in early-modern collections and herbal history; and Marge Bradshaw, a socially engaged artist and award-winning photographer. We are co-researching Wellcome’s collections to understand the historical precedents for inequitable gynaecological healthcare for LGBTQ+ people, including ancient anatomical votives. One major output was a substantial corpus of creative work inspired by Wellcome's collections and the co-research process, including hand-made votives.

Wellcome's Sudanese Collections & Connections, in partnership with a coalition of UK-based Sudanese community researchers and Zaki el-Salahi, an interdisciplinary researcher, anti-racist practitioner and reparative justice expert. We are co-researching the Wellcome Tropical Research Laboratories, the archaeological excavations led/funded by Wellcome at Jebel Moya and Meroë, and the ancestral remains taken from the site of the so-called 'Battle of Omdurman' (1898). One major output was a two-day community-led research, engagement and knowledge exchange workshop at Wellcome Collection and the National Collections Centre at the Science Museum. Click here to watch several community researchers sharing reflections on their experiences of the workshop.

Publications

(in preparation) 'The Meroë Head of Augustus: eco-orientalist entanglements between Sudan, Rome and Britain'.

(accepted/forthcoming) 'Extra-urban sanctuaries and environments: environmental history, eco-orientalism, and the Sacred Grove of Tadmor-Palmyra' Acta Instituti Atheniensis Regni Sueciae.

(2024) 'Ecological grief and the Safaitic inscriptions of ancient north Arabia' in Eidinow, E. and Schliephake, C. eds. Conversing with Chaos in Graeco-Roman Antiquity. Writing and Reading Environmental Disorder in Ancient Texts, Bloomsbury Ancient Environments, pp.135-148.

(2024) UK Class in Classics Report 2024, with L.G. Canevaro, M. Canevaro, B. Mazzinghi Gori, and H. Stead.

(2022) ‘Religious Life’ with Ewins, A. in Kaizer, T. ed. A Companion to the Hellenistic and Roman Near East, Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World, Malden, MA .

(2021) 'Contextualizing the sacred in the Hellenistic and Roman Near East' Bibliotheca Orientalis 77.5/6, pp.429-445.

(2020) 'Environments and gods: creating the sacred landscape of Mount Kasios’ in Haüssler, R. and Chiai, G.F. eds. Sacred Landscapes in Antiquity: Creation, Manipulation, Transformation, Oxford.

Public engagement

I regularly contribute to the activities of the Warwick Classics Network and specialise in the history and material culture of the Roman world. I am passionate about studying the ancient world through a plurality of voices and bringing them into dialogue with modern interests, particularly the climate crisis and social justice. I was Editor of the Stories of Objects blog, which brought to life aspects of the ancient world through the study of individual objects. The blog featured posts by our student community and evolved from my Stories of Objects module that launched in summer 2021. School teachers are welcome to use the blog to support their teaching. My research interests and teaching specialisms complement the following OCR modules:

• GCSE Ancient History: Cleopatra: Rome and Egypt and Britannia: from conquest to province
• A-Level Ancient History: The Julio-Claudian Emperors and The Flavians
• GCSE Classical Civilisation: Myth and Religion, Women in the ancient world, and Roman city life
• A-Level Classical Civilisation: Imperial Image and Invention of the Barbarian

School teachers are welcome to use any of my existing online content to support their teaching:

• The 'Golden Age' of Aretas: the Khazneh in Petra (2021 Warwick Ancient Worlds Day) - suitable for the Imperial Image and The Julio-Claudian Emperors
• Decolonising the Imperial Image: the Res Gestae and the Ara Pacis (2020 Classical Civilisation Teachers Day) - suitable for the Imperial Image and The Julio-Claudian Emperors
• Feasting in Ancient Palmyra (Resonate Festival: Feasts!) - suitable for KS3 ancient history/classical civilisation

Qualifications

• BA; MA; PhD (Durham)