I came to Brasenose in 1997, having worked at University College Dublin. I was an undergraduate in Classics here in Oxford, then wrote a PhD in Cambridge. I appear regularly on “Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics” on BBC Radio 4, and I am currently Chair of the Faculty Board of Classics (Head of Dept.) in Oxford. I am Professor of Latin and Greek Languages and Literature.

I teach all Latin literary subjects and some Greek, and also cover unseen translation in each language.

Classics at Oxford is the largest Classics faculty in the world, and it offers students the opportunity to study the Greco-Roman world from an almost limitless number of perspectives, literature, history, art history, philosophy, linguistics and archaeology. The tutorial is for me the essence of the Oxford experience. If the students have done some detailed reading and thought hard about the subject each week, the result is a conversation about a fascinating topic from which everyone, students and tutor, emerge with a deeper understanding.

I have written books and articles about Virgil, Ovid, Horace and many other Roman poets. I have pursued specific interests in poetic form with a book on the meaning conveyed by ancient poetic metre, but my interests extend also into the political contexts of Roman poetry and the influence on surviving poetry of texts that are now fragmentary.

I have also worked on nineteenth-century colonial archaeology in present-day Pakistan and Afghanistan, studying travellers and colonial officials, often classically educated, and their investigations of the Greek influence on this area after the campaigns of Alexander.

I am also interested in Latin poetry and prose written at the end of the nineteenth century, when its authors might fear that Latin was in danger of disappearing from schools and universities, but might also harbour the hope that Latin could become a common language that would counteract the growing nationalism of that time.