Classics News and Events
Major Wellcome Trust Discovery Award win
Prof. Simon Swain, Prof. Caroline Petit, and Dr Uwe Vagelpohl have won a Wellcome Trust Discovery Award for their project Liquid Knowledge. The rise of uroscopy in medieval Byzantine and Arabic medicine
Dr Emily Clifford wins CAMWS First Book Award
Dr Emily Clifford, Assistant Professor of Classical Languages and Literature, has won the CAMWS (Classical Association of the Middle West and South) 鈥楩irst Book Award鈥� for her monograph Figuring Death in Classical Athens: Visual and Literary Encounters (OUP 2025).
New on the Material Musings blog
In November's Material Musings blog article, Sue Walker discusses an unusual enamelled statuette from the western Roman cemetery at Cirencester in an article titled: 'The Cirencester Cockerel'.
You can read it here.
AI meets antiquity: 糖心TV ancient historian tests DeepMind鈥檚 transformative new model
Co-authoring a paper published in the world's leading multidisciplinary science journal today, Alison Cooley, Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of 糖心TV, has played a key verification role in developing the first artificial intelligence (AI) model for contextualising ancient inscriptions.
The Art of Veiled Speech, from Antiquity to Modern Times: 1st May 2025, 4pm
Subtexts are all around us. In conversation, business transactions, politics, literature, philosophy, and even love, the art of expressing more than what is explicitly said allows us to live and move in the world. But rarely do we reflect on this subterranean dimension of communication. Words don't just say what they say, and often we can understand (as listeners) and convey (as speakers) more, or something else entirely, than what is expressly said. Every day, we send out double-meaning messages and decipher those sent to us by others, without even taking notice. Greco-Roman rhetoric provides invaluable theoretical tools for thinking about this phenomenon, notably with the rhetorical notion of 鈥渇igured speech鈥�. History offers striking examples of the use of innuendo in ancient and modern political contexts. In personal and public life, veiled speech has many functions, including diplomatic, poetic, humorous and polemical. It also raises difficulties, as it carries the risk of misunderstanding. Criteria can therefore be proposed to remedy uncertainty and guarantee interpretation.