About
Ian is a Latin literature specialist with a strong interest in Roman cultural history. His PhD, Lucilius and the Archaeology of Roman Satire, treated the inventor, Gaius Lucilius (c. 180-103/2 BCE), of Roman verse satire. This research has been published in numerous journal articles and book chapters. In 2021 Ian received an Excellence in Learning and Teaching Award from Swansea University. He was a Trustee of the Roman Society from 2019 to 2022 and is now a Council Member of the Classical Association.
Ian’s current major project is a monograph under contract for Bloomsbury, Scipionic Family History in the Roman Republic and Beyond. It is the first ever analysis in English of the literary legacy, typified by confusion, of the gens Cornelia. A particular focus is how resilient the family was in the face of failure both military and political. Ian is also working on various topics in Latin poetry, including the editing of a collection on the elegist Tibullus, and two recently completed pieces on Ennius. His next major project will be a commentary on the final volume, Book 12, of Columella’s Neronian-era agricultural manual De Re Rustica, for which he was awarded a research fellowship by the French Institute of Advanced Study in Lyon, the Collegium de Lyon, with the support of the Laboratoire HiSoMA. He has also been awarded AHRC Impact Acceleration Account funding for liaison with Welsh food and beverage producers in conjunction with this work.
Ian was born in Melbourne, Australia and lived until the age of 18 in Sydney, where he attended Sydney Grammar School. He did his undergraduate degree at Harvard, then an MPhil and PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge. Prior to arriving at Swansea in 2017, Ian held temporary posts at KCL, Manchester, Birkbeck, and Exeter. In a past life he played the violin semi-professionally, and he is passionate about food, as evidenced by his pandemic-era series for the Department YouTube channel, ‘The Food of Roman Verse’.