Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

About Me: My PhD was on Lord Byron and eighteenth-century constructions of gender (University of Leeds, 2008). I have since then pursued research on classical reception; specifically the history of Sardanapalus, the legendary last king of Assyria. This has involved a second MA in Ancient History (KCL and UCL, 2013), and tracing the references to and uses of Sardanapalus in Western European culture from the late medieval period onwards. My current focus is on Sardanapalus in the early modern period; Sardanapalus and Semiramis in early modern histories of Assyria (forthcoming in Beyond Greece and Rome, ed. by Jane Grogan, OUP); Sardanapalus and constructions of ‘effeminacy’ in early translations of Diodorus Siculus in Italian, French, and English (in progress); and the rhetorical functions of Sardanapalus in humanist exemplarity and commonplacing (in progress). I also have publication plans for a study of Sardanapalus in the ancient Greek tradition, with a particular focus on Diodorus.

Recent Publications: ‘Assyria in Early Modern Historiography’ (forthcoming) in Beyond Greece and Rome, ed. by Jane Grogan (OUP, 2019).

‘Sodomy as Erotic Spectacle in John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure’, in Spectacle, Sex and Property in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture, eds Julie A. Chappell and Kamille Stone Stanton (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 2015).

‘Negotiations of Harem Fantasies in Lord Byron’s Don Juan’ (Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, 2009, 56).

Expertise by Chronology: Ancient, Pre-17th century, 18th century, 19th century