Spotlight on... Michael McOsker

Michael McOsker This week we meet Michael McOsker, a researcher in the Department of Greek and Latin. Michael chats to us about his work translating and editing the ancient poetry of everyday people and his favourite viewpoint in Naples. 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.