The Team
Dr Elton Barker
Dr Elton Barker is a lecturer in Classical Studies at the Open University, after having previously been a college lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford for five years. Author of a series of articles on epic poetry and the epic cycle, Sophocles and Herodotus, he has recently published a book with Oxford University Press entitled Entering the Agon: Dissent and Authority in Homer, Historiography and Tragedy (January 2009), which investigates representations of debate in three major genres of ancient Greek literature in terms of a hermeneutic framework of institutional dissent from authority. He was a participant in the inaugural International Seminar in the Humanities (based at the Venice International University), a month-long workshop which explored the intersections between culture and literature in the Ancient Near-East and Mediterranean, and which has since led to further collaborative research on archaic Greek poetry and Homer’s representation of Thebes.
In addition to teaching at Oxford, he has lectured, supervised and taught languages at the universities of Bristol, Nottingham and Reading and for various Cambridge colleges. He was awarded a special teaching prize while supervising for Pembroke, Cambridge, and has been officially accredited as making an outstanding contribution to teaching by the University of Oxford on two consecutive years (2006-7) – the only member of the Oxford Faculty to be thus recognized. He holds a Ph.D. (Cantab.) as well as a first class honours degree in Classical Civilization from the University of Leeds, two Masters degrees (with distinction) in Greek and Latin from Leeds and Ohio State, and was elected to a Junior Research Fellowship at Wolfson College, Cambridge for 2003-4.
Dr Stefan Bouzarovski (Buzar)
Dr Stefan Bouzarovski (Buzar) is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Birmingham, UK. He is also a Visiting Professor for the Geography Section of the Faculty of Science at Charles University, Prague (Czech Republic) as well as the Department of Economic Geography at the University of Gdansk (Poland). He is the author of Energy Poverty in Eastern Europe: Hidden Geographies of Deprivation (Ashgate, 2007), having published research articles on issues of trans-national energy flows, social inequality and urban transformation in post-socialism in a number of international peer-reviewed journals. He holds doctoral and masters degrees (with distinction) in, respectively, economic geography and environmental management from the University of Oxford, UK.
Stefan has held various academic and non-governmental appointments, including a Junior Research Fellowship at Christ Church College, Oxford, a Post Doctoral Research Fellowship at Queen Mary, University of London and a Larkinson Scholarship at St. Hugh's College, Oxford, UK. He has also led various international research projects and organisations.
Professor Christopher Pelling
Christopher Pelling has been Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford University since 2003. Before that, he was McConnell Laing Fellow and Praelector in Classics at University College, Oxford. His books include a commentary on Plutarch, Life of Antony (Cambridge, 1988), Literary Texts and the Greek Historian (London, 2000), and Plutarch and History (Swansea, 2002); he has also edited collections on Characterization and Individuality in Greek Literature (Oxford, 1990) and Greek Tragedy and the Historian (Oxford, 1997).
His articles include several on Herodotus, especially 'Thucydides' Archidamus and Herodotus' Artabanus' in Georgica (ed. M. Toher and M.Flower, BICS Supplement 1991), 'East is East and West is West - or are they? National stereptyping in Herodotus' in Histos 1997, 'Speech and narrative: Herodotus' debate on the constitutions' in PCPS 2002, 'Educating Croesus: talking and learning in Herodotus' in Classical Antiquity 2006, 'Homer and Herodotus' in Epic Interactions, ed. B. Currie, M. Clarke, and R.O.A.M. Lyne (Oxford 2006), 'Aristagoras' in Reading Herodotus, ed E. Greenwood and E. Irwin (Cambridge,2007), and the chapter on the speeches in the Cambridge Companion to Herodotus, ed. J. Marincola and C. Dewald (2006). He has also written on other Greek and Roman historians and biographers, especially Plutarch, and on various topics in Greek tragedy and in Roman history.
Mr Leif Isaksen
Mr Leif Isaksen specialises in the application of IT to analyse the use and conception of space in the ancient world. He was formerly Senior IT Development Officer at Oxford Archaeology where he worked on methodologies to map maritime heritage among other projects. He moderates the Antiquist IT and Cultural Heritage community and co-organised the Methods Network workshop on the topic of Space and Time: Methods in Geospatial Computing for Mapping the Past. He has an MSc in Archaeological Computing and is currently studying for a Ph.D. at the University of Southampton developing an assistive research framework to integrate information from across multiple excavation data repositories.