Academic Staff
Professor Katherine Harloe (Director)
A podcast interview is available at Classics Confidential
The Director of the Institute is responsible to the School and the University; she represents the Institute both at home and abroad, guiding its policies and development in consultation with colleagues to ensure that the Institute fulfils its role in promoting and facilitating research in Classics and related disciplines, nationally and internationally. The Director also serves as General Editor of the Institute's Publications.
Katherine joins the Institute in October 2021 from the University of Reading, where she was Professor of Classics and Intellectual History. She is an interdisciplinary classicist whose research spans the history of classical scholarship, the reception of Greek and Roman antiquity in European culture from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, the history of political thought and gender history. She is known particularly for her work on the eighteenth-century scholar Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the so-called 'father' of classical archaeology, and has also published on authors ranging from Sappho, Thucydides and Pausanias to Hannah Arendt and Walter Pater. She is currently working on a study of Winckelmann's queer love letters and is also principal investigator of 'Beyond Notability: Re-evaluating Women's Work in Archaeology, History and Heritage in Britain, 1870 - 1950', a three-year (2021 - 24) project that explores the potential of historical archives to uncover hidden histories of scholarship and is pioneering new modes of public engagement in partnership with the Society of Antiquaries of London.
Dr Gabriel Bodard (Reader in Digital Classics)
+44 (0)207 862 8752
Gabriel Bodard is Reader in Digital Classics at the ICS since September 2015. He has been the organizer of the Digital Classicist seminar since 2006, and teaches classes and workshops on digital methods for classicists and archaeologists as well as summer schools on digital encoding for ancient epigraphy and papyrology internationally.
After a PhD in classics from the University of Reading (dissertation title: "Witches Cursing and Necromancy: representations of 'magic' in classical and archaic Greece") he worked for fourteen years in digital humanities at King's College London, specializing in digital epigraphy and collaborating on several major corpora of inscriptions (Aphrodisias, Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, Northern Black Sea) and Papyri (Papyri.info) and is a co-author of the EpiDoc Guidelines for XML encoding of ancient documents. He is the principal investigator of the Standards for Networking Ancient Prosopographies
Dr Amara Thornton (Co-Investigator and Research Fellow)
+44 (0)207 862 8061
Dr Amara Thornton is Research Fellow and Co-Investigator of "Beyond Notability: Re-evaluating Women's Work in Archaeology, History and Heritage in Britain, 1870 – 1950". She is a historian of archaeology with a research focus on archaeological collections histories in museums, social history and networks in archaeology, archives of archaeology, and popular publishing in archaeology, particularly during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Amara was Research Officer leading Narrating the Diverse Past, a joint University of Reading/British Museum partnership project (2020-2021), and prior to that Research Officer at the Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology at the University of Reading (2019-2020). In 2018, she obtained a CBRL Centenary award to produce www.petra1929.co.uk. Between 2013 and 2016 Amara held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, during which she researched and wrote her first book Archaeologists in Print: Publishing for the People (UCL Press, 2018). In 2010 she founded the History of Archaeology Network at the UCL Institute of Archaeology, where she obtained her PhD in 2011. She has led Filming Antiquity, a digitisation and research project on historic excavation footage, since 2014.
Amara's forthcoming book is a co-edited anthology with Dr Katy Soar. Strange Relics: Stories of Archaeology and the Supernatural will be published by Handheld Press in 2022.
Administrative Staff
Valerie James, MA, MLitt (Institute Manager)
+44 (0)207 862 8716
Valerie James was appointed as Institute Manager for the Institute of Classical Studies on 1 September 2014 and has taken on responsibilities covering both the Institute and the Library.
After undertaking research at Oxford on 17th century French history, she enjoyed a varied administrative career in the public and the not for profit sectors. In 2004 she co-edited the Bede Roll of the Fraternity of St Nicholas (the Parish Clerks' fraternity) for the London Record Society, a text which throws light on local, ecclesiastical and musical history.
She joined the School of Advanced Study in 2006 as Administrator of the Institute of Musical Research, subsequently becoming Consortium Administrative Manager for three Institutes within the School before taking up her current post.
Library Staff
Joanna Ashe, MSc, MA (Librarian)
+44 (0)207 862 8710
Joanna Ashe joined the ICS/Joint Library as Librarian in May 2017. She is responsible for day-to-day management of the Library, including the library accommodation and the arrangement of the collection as a whole. She read classics at St Hilda’s College Oxford, and then completed a Masters in Library and Information Science at City University London. She has previously worked at the Royal College of Physicians.
Paul Jackson, MA MCLIP (Deputy Librarian)
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+44 (0)207 862 8712
Paul Jackson is the Deputy Librarian. He is responsible for cataloguing and classifying the Library’s books and liaises with the reviews editors of the Hellenic and Roman Societies’ journals regarding review books requested and received by the Library. He administers the Library’s Rare Book collection in its new Suite, material ranging from a 1501 edition of Livy to books annotated by Michael Ventris. He is the contact point for Health and Safety matters in the Institute and represents the Institute on the SAS Health and Safety Committee. He also represents the Library on the London Byzantine Sub-Committee and edits its twice-yearly book-list, which coordinates the acquisition of Byzantine material in London. He read Classics at Magdalene College Cambridge, before a year as a SCONUL trainee at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, followed by a Postgraduate Diploma in Librarianship at Newcastle Polytechnic (now the University of Northumbria).
Sue Willetts, MSc, MA MCLIP (Senior Library Assistant)
+44 (0)207 862 8709
Sue Willetts is the Senior Library Assistant with responsibility for circulation and reader services, including electronic resources, and assists with updating the library’s webpage. She is currently the chair of the Staff Training Group for the University’s Graduate Trainee programme. She studied at the University of Sheffield, reading Ancient History / Classical Civilisation as an undergraduate. She then took a Postgraduate Diploma in Librarianship at The College of Librarianship Wales (CLW) in Aberystwyth, which included a period of work experience. She was very pleased to be able to spend this time in the ICS / Joint Library when it was based in Gordon Square. Her first library post was in a Polytechnic’s business and law library where she became a Subject Librarian, during which time she studied part time for MSc in Information Systems and Technology at London’s City University. She returned to the ICS Library in 1990 as a Library Assistant. In more recent years, she studied for an MA in Classical Studies with the Open University, with a final dissertation on Costume in Aristophanic comedy. Her interests in the Classical world are wide ranging and include Greek tragedy and comedy, especially modern performances, Greek vase painting and the history and archaeology of Roman Britain.
Christopher Ashill, MA, MLib, MCLIP (Library Assistant)
+44 (0)207 862 8711
Christopher joined the staff of the Institute of Classical Studies Library in June 2009 as Periodicals Library Assistant. His main responsibilities include the day-to-day administration of the Library’s periodical collection, and maintaining a programme of publication exchanges with libraries, museums, universities, professional associations and individual scholars across the world. He also enjoys assisting the Library’s readers while staffing the enquiry desk. After graduating in History from Worcester College Oxford, Christopher completed a Masters qualification in Information and Library Studies at the University of Wales Aberystwyth. Thereafter he enjoyed working in a variety of academic and specialist libraries, including the Lindley Library of the Royal Horticultural Society and the University of London Library (now Senate House Library).
Library Assistant
Rosario Rovira Guardiola, BA
Telephone: (library desk) 020 7862 8709
Winnington Ingram Trainee 2021-2022
Mrs Chloë Carson-Ashurst, MA, BA
Telephone: (library desk) 020 7862 8709
A.G. Leventis Scanner Operator
Mr Aaron Fordwoh, BA
Telephone: (library workroom) 020 7862 8711
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