PhD CLASSICS

The Department has special expertise in a range of areas – literary, historical, and philosophical – within the field of classical studies. It is particularly strong in the areas of the ancient novel, ancient philosophy (especially Cynicism and Epicureanism), and late Antiquity/early Christianity, but other areas in which thesis supervision can be offered include death and writing on death in Antiquity, epistolography, Greek epic and drama, Greek social history, Hellenistic history, Latin poetry, Roman Republican history, Roman religion, the Second Sophistic, and modern receptions of the classical world. These do not exhaust the possibilities for higher-degree research in the Department, however, and enquiries are welcome.
 

Dr William Desmond
William Desmond’s main research focuses on the literature, history, and cultural life of the Classical Greek period.  He has a particular interest in Plato and the Cynics, in both their essential ‘Greekness’ and their manifold influence beyond the Greek world.  He has published monographs on Classical Greek understandings of wealth and poverty, on the Cynics, and on the historical varieties of the ‘philosopher-king’ from Plato to the twentieth century.  He also has some expertise in nineteenth-century receptions of the Classics, and in process philosophy from Heraclitus to Whitehead.

Dr Kieran McGroarty
Kieran McGroarty’s research career began in the area of Neoplatonic philosophy, his work culminating in a monograph on Plotinus.  He now works in the field of Greek social and cultural history, especially of the Classical period.  He has also published on Alexander the Great, and maintains a keen interest in this area.

Dr Maeve O’Brien
Maeve O’Brien’s principal research subject is the second-century-AD Latin writer Apuleius.  She works chiefly on his novel the Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass), but is also interested in his philosophical writing.  Beyond this, her specialist areas extend to take in Petronius and the genre of the ancient novel generally; Middle Platonism and other philosophical doctrines of the period known as the Second Sophistic; and the reception of the classical world in Irish writing of the eighteenth century, with a particular focus on women writers and their reading publics.

Dr Cosetta Cadau
Cosetta Cadau works on literature of the fourth to the sixth century AD, particularly Greek epic. Her research focuses on the renegotiation of classical tradition in the Late Antique period and within Christian literary contexts, and the evolution of concepts of gender and identity in the Late Antique period. She is the author of the first interpretative monograph on Egyptian epic poet Colluthus (Studies in Colluthus’ Abduction of Helen).

Dr Jonathan Davies
Jonathan Davies' research focusses on early Roman imperial history, especially the history of Judaism and the Jewish people under Roman rule. The work of Flavius Josephus is at the core of my current work, which straddles borderlines between history and literature, as between Greek, Roman and Judaic historiography.