Dr James Oakley (BA, MSt, DPhil, AFHEA)

Teaching and Research Fellow in Classical Languages and Literature

Contact details

Availability

  • Office Hours (by appointment) are 15:00-17:00 on Thursdays. My office is 00M.20, right at the end of the hallway.

Biography

Background

With a background in both Classics and Egyptology, I have come to Edinburgh to teach Greek, Latin, and comparative approaches to the ancient world. My undergraduate degree was in Classics and Egyptology at the University of Oxford, where I stayed to do my MSt and then doctorate (finished in 2022), writing my dissertation on Greek and Egyptian uses of war as a literary trope to reflect on their conquest by foreign powers. Since then I have had positions in Oxford and Durham, teaching a range of subjects including Greek and Latin language, Greek tragedy, and Roman (and Egyptian) epic, before finally making it to Edinburgh. I continue to be active in research on Classical and Egyptological subjects, publishing on them independently and in comparison.

Research summary

Areas of Interest:

New Kingdom Egyptian inscriptions

Hellenistic Poetry

Demotic Egyptian literature

Imperial Greek and Roman Poetry

 

Subjects:

War

Cultural Trauma

Phenomenology

Space

Comparative Studies

 

Current research interests

My research interests continue to range widely over the Greek, Roman, and Egyptian worlds, though with a particular interest in their literatures under the Roman Empire, as well as during Egypt's New Kingdom and the Hellenistic/Ptolemaic Period. My interest in conceptions of war has progressed into a more specific focus on the use of military narratives to process cultural trauma, building on recent work in critical trauma theory. I am also currently working on a comparative application of phenomenology and orientalism to narratives of journeys east during the Roman Empire, with a particular focus on Lucan's Pharsalia, Nonnus' Dionysiaca, and the Egyptian Petechons and Serpot and Coptic Alexander Romance. Further interests include concepts of whiteness and colourism in Greek and Roman poetry, thought (and nightmares) in New Kingdom Egypt, and the reception of Roman epic by Imperial Greek poets. I have published on allusions to Ovid in Quintus of Smyrna's Posthomerica, Demotic and New Kingdom similes, and the Gallus papyrus.

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