What is your role and what does it involve?
I’m a researcher in the Department of Greek and Latin, with the project ’ Hexameters Beyond the Canon: New Poetry from Roman and Byzantine Egypt ’. At this stage, we’re mostly still editing the poems in question, which are written on pieces of papyrus (ancient paper) that were found in Egypt, at ancient Oxyrhynchus = modern Al Bahnasa, in Egypt. The whole Oxyrhynchus collection is huge; this is just one small part of it.The main idea is to look at non-canonical literature - not the greats whose poems were copied generation after generation, but the ones who wrote a poem as a school assignment or for a contest or because for the hell of it one day. The first one I worked on in this project is a poem in honour of the guy who paid to have a building built or rebuilt - it’s not great stuff as poetry, but it’s interesting that someone wrote a poem for him - it’s even more interesting that that someone was a total amateur. Once we have these published, we plan to read them in conjunction with other similar poetry preserved in other media (such as inscriptions from Egypt and elsewhere) to try to build up a picture of the literary life of one small slice of the quotidian ancient world. The idea is to try to see everything, not just the crème de la crème, and to get a clearer idea of what role poetry played in normal people’s lives.
How long have you been at UCL and what was your previous role?
I started in October of last year, so not very much time at all. Before that, I was an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoc at the University of Cologne. There, I was working on the carbonised papyri found in Herculaneum, specifically on a philosophical analysis of how poetry ’works’ - that is, when you read or hear a poem, what happens in your soul (or mind, we might say nowadays)- How is it that oddly arranged language about a fictional topic can have such an effect on us?What working achievement or initiative are you most proud of?
Possibly the book that came out of my PhD thesis, On the Good Poem According to Philodemus. It was a tremendous amount of work to juggle the fragmentary texts, their philosophical background, and the bigger picture, but I’m proud of the result and people seem to find it useful.What is your favourite album, film and novel?
Favourite album: Oh man, it’s impossible to choose. Anything by Springsteen pre ’85, or either ’59Sound or American Slang from Gaslight Anthem. I think I wrote half my dissertation to ’59 Sound. One of my flatmates knew not to bother me when it was playing.Favourite Novel: Catch 22 kills me every time.
