People

Daniel Anderson

Daniel works on Ancient Greek poetry and aesthetics, especially theatre and performance cultures, comedy, invective, and the history of the poetry book. His monograph looks at the rhetoric of innovation in Old Comedy as a reflection of competition between rival theatrical traditions around the ancient Mediterranean. Daniel runs an Ancient Greek reading group at Coventry, and (with Victoria Leonard) a reading group on gendered violence. He is organizer (with Raffaella Cribiore) of an upcoming Entretiens pour l’antiquité classique at the Fondation Hardt.

Sarah Capel

Sarah is working on a practice-based PhD exploring how women’s identities are embodied in embroidered fabrics. Since graduating from her MA in History from the University of Warwick, she has applied her research skills in areas of social justice, including eight years spent working at the Prison Reform Trust.  She maintained an art practice in textiles and printmaking throughout. This led her to working with the Young Mums Support Network, where she combined her commitment to social justice with her art practice by working with young mothers and survivors of domestic abuse as an artist-facilitator. She uses embroidery in her practice and workshops. Many items hand-embroidered by workshop participants embody their personal narratives and are used as gifts. Her recent work reflects on women’s embroidery as a means to explore identity, boost self-confidence and strengthen relationships.

Marie-Louise Crawley

Marie-Louise is a choreographer, artist researcher and Assistant Professor in Dance and Cultural Engagement at the Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE), Coventry University. She is also an Early Career Associate at the Archive of Performance of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD), University of Oxford. Her research interests include dance and museums, and areas of intersection between Classics and Dance Studies such as ancient dance and the performance of epic through a practice-research lens. She has created durational performances for the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology and for a TATE/Artist Rooms exhibit for mac Birmingham. 

Juliet Simpson

Juliet is Professor of Art History at the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities. Her research explores the significance and afterlives of pre-modern art in objects, images and texts in shaping belonging, memory and identity across borders of time, place, gender and cultures. She is particularly interested in transverse temporalities of pre-modern art, and migrating and embodied practices of pre-modern object ‘lives’ in histories, spaces and their multiple, entangled ‘afterlives’. Her current projects include rediscovering pre-modern ‘wonder’ cultures, and as PI and Guest Curator for the international exhibition, Gothic Modern, 1825-1925: Edvard Munch to Käthe Kollwitz, Alteneum-Helsinki-Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin and Oslo Nationalmuseum, opening 2024-25.

Adeola Eze

Adeola is a Postgraduate Researcher in the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities at Coventry University with a research interest that critically assesses the discovery, preservation, reception, and reuse of ancient book formats in contemporary literature through an experimental approach. Her research project, The Reception of Ancient Book Formats in Contemporary Experimental Literature, investigates the significance of ancient book formats before the printing press in facilitating a deeper understanding of the dynamic relationship between historical contexts and contemporary literary expressions. Adeola examines the process of imprinting textual content onto several mediums, including paper, vellum or parchment, wood, leaves and metal, the practices of which were widely employed in book production in ancient civilisations, acknowledging the diverse shapes in which these texts are presented, such as scrolls, codex, palimpsests etc.

Ben Dew

Ben is an Associate Head in the School of Humanities, and an Associate Fellow of the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities. He works on the history of historical writing, with particular reference to the Enlightenment. His monograph, Commerce, Finance and Statecraft: Histories of England, 1600-1780, was published by Manchester University Press in 2018. Ben’s current research is concerned with historical writing about Poland.  

Kirsty Harrod

Kirsty is a third year PhD candidate in the Centre for Arts, Memory, and Community, working towards a thesis on rape narratives in Greek tragedy. They completed their Masters in Classics at the University of Exeter in 2016 after doing an Undergraduate degree at the same university. In their years out of academia, they worked in charity and politics, and they continue to campaign in their role as the Postgraduate Officer for Coventry University. With Anna Andreopoulou and Michael J. Curtis, Kirsty was a Joint Chair 2022/2023 of the Institute of Classical Studies’ Postgraduate Work in Progress Seminar.

Samantha Harper Robins

Samantha is a dancer, choreographer, and doctoral researcher at Coventry University’s Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE), where her research investigates dance verbs in the Hebrew Bible from the perspective of embodiment studies. Her research interests include Hebrew Bible, embodiment, embodiment in antiquity, phenomenology and dance, ancient dance, and ancient text.

Judith Mossman

Judith is responsible for the strategic leadership of arts and humanities across the University Group at Coventry. Previously, Judith held the post of Professor of Classics at the University of Nottingham, and fellowships at Trinity College, Dublin, and Christ Church, Oxford. She was President of the Hellenic Society (2017-20). Judith specialises in Greek literature in the fifth century BCE and the second/third century CE. She is the author of two books and a number of edited volumes and articles on Euripides and Plutarch.

Victoria Leonard

Victoria is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities at Coventry University. She is an Honorary Research Associate in the Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London, and a Research Fellow at the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London. Victoria’s research focuses on the late antique and early medieval western Mediterranean, with a special interest in data collection, ancient and early medieval historiography, and gender, sexuality, violence, and theories of the body in antiquity. Victoria was the David Walker Memorial Fellow at the Bodleian Library, Oxford University, in 2023.

Olivia Garro

Olivia is currently in the second year of her PhD at the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities. Her doctoral project focuses on the iconographies of witchcraft during the Italian Renaissance, investigating Francesco Maria Guazzo’s inquisitorial treatise, the Compendium Maleficarum (Milan, 1608) and its woodcuts. She is particularly interested in the use of art as a political and prosecution tool, in the issues of gender and sexuality, printed and visual culture, and classical reception.

After completing her studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze (MA Curatorship, BA Prints and Drawings), Olivia specialized at the Warburg Institute (MA in Art History, Curatorship and Renaissance Culture) in London. Ever since, she has been working in different roles at the British Museum, where she is now with the Events and Conferencing and Memberships departments. 

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Madeleine Bracey

Madeleine is a PhD student in the Centre for Arts, Memory, and Communities. She is working with supervisors Alice Leonard and Patricia Phillippy on her project, ‘Reconstructing Coventry Early Modern Grammar School’. Founded in 1545, Coventry’s original Grammar School building still stands in the City Centre today. The School housed a library which is the focus of Madeleine’s project.

Working closely with Coventry Archives and items from Cambridge University Library, Madeleine is using palaeographical and bibliographical techniques to investigate the extensive sources from the School. These include Early Modern books that were held by the library and now reside in Coventry Archives, as well as a library catalogue and a record of book donors from the seventeenth century. The results of Madeleine’s research will be communicated to the public using multiple platforms, contributing to the legacy of Coventry City of Culture 2021. This dissemination will take the form of a digital humanities project which will be supervised by Jacqueline Cawston.

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Imogen Peck

Imogen is a historian of memory and communities, with research expertise in local and family history, the social history of archives, and the mental afterlife of conflict. Her first book, Recollection in the Republics: Memories of the British Civil Wars in England, 1649-1659, was published by Oxford University Press in 2021. Her current project, ‘Family Archives and their Afterlives’, explores the construction and curation of family archives from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Her research has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Higher Education Academy.  

Patricia Phillippy

Patricia is a Professor of Material and Cultural Memories and former Director of the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities. She is currently undertaking a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship. Her research is concerned with pre-Cartesian ecologies of embodiment and environment, and the centrality of memory to formulations of identity in early modern England and colonial America. Her monograph in progress examines pre-industrial climate change, understood as anthropogenic and racialised, and intertwined with illness, mortality, and rituals of death and mourning inflected by gender and race. Employing a critical medical humanities method, this study explores the entanglement of memory, climate and mortality in the period of climate extremes precipitated in part by European colonial expansion.

Katja Pilhuj

Katja is a Lecturer in English Language. She specializes in Early Modern English Drama, focusing on how geographical discourses, both written and visual, helps to shape theatrical representation of character and setting. Her book, Women and Geography on the Early Modern English Stage, was published in 2019 with Amsterdam University Press. Katja is currently researching Early Modern English depictions of Eastern Europe in maps and atlases and on the stage.

Shannon Weston

Shannon is a second year PhD student in the Centre of Arts, Memory and Communities. Her project explores Morality and Marginalisation: A Creative and Critical Approach to the Moral Dilemmas of Women and Pirates in the Eighteenth Century. The thesis will consist of a novel and a critical piece which she aims to publish after the compilation of the course. She completed her Masters Degree in Writing for Performance (2019) and her Undergraduate Degree in Creative and Professional Writing (2018) at the University of Derby. She blogs about writing and disability on her website, Little Sea Bear.

Christopher Lillington-Martin

Christopher is a PhD student in the Centre for Arts, Memory, and Communities. His doctoral research centres on historiography and characterisation in the writings of Procopius of Caesarea. His PhD supervisors are Professor Judith Mossman, Dr Daniel Anderson and Dr Victoria Leonard. Christopher is principal editor of the volume Procopius of Caesarea: Literary and Historical Interpretations (Routledge, 2018). His other publications include “Turning Traitor: Shifting Loyalties in Procopius’ Gothic Wars”, Byzantina Symmeikta, 2021 (co-authored with Michael Stewart); “Procopius on the struggle for Dara and Rome”, War and Warfare in Late Antiquity by A. Sarantis and N. Christie (Brill, 2013). He has held fellowships at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Turing) and Fondation Hardt, Geneva (Classical Association). He co-organised a workshop on ‘Procopius and his World’ at the University of Barcelona (May 2023).