Staff

The Director of the Institute is responsible to the School and the University; he 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.

Professor Woolf’s research concerns the history and archaeology of the ancient world at the very large scale.Current projects include books on urbanism and on mobility, and ongoing collaborations on ancient library culture with former colleagues in St Andrews. He is an associated fellow at the Max Weber Kolleg in Erfurt where, along with Professor Jörg Rüpke, he  leads a major research project, funded by the Humboldt Foundation, into the role of sanctuaries in forming religious experience.

Professor Woolf sits on the British Museum Research Committee and he chairs the Council of University Classical Departments.

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

Digital Classicist profile

Emma Bridges joined the ICS as Public Engagement Fellow in September 2017. After an undergraduate degree in Classics at Oxford, she completed her PhD at the University of Durham. Prior to moving to the ICS Emma was a Lecturer in Classical Studies at the Open University, where she worked to make classical subjects available to those with a diverse range of backgrounds and experiences. She brings to the ICS her experience in making academic research accessible to audiences beyond academia, and to those for whom Classics has not traditionally been available as a course of study, as well as her commitment to fostering conversation and collaboration between academics and wider communities.

Emma’s published research focuses on the ancient and modern receptions of the Persian Wars; her first book, Imagining Xerxes: Ancient Perspectives on a Persian King, looks at ways in which Xerxes was reimagined in a variety of ancient literary and historical contexts. She is also responsible for conducting a series of interviews for the online open access journal Practitioners’ Voices in Classical Reception Studies, with a particular focus on contemporary reworkings of ancient myths. Her current research project brings together her interests in the depiction of armed conflict and the reception of ancient myth by exploring the ways in which the experiences of soldiers’ wives depicted in the Homeric poems and Athenian tragedy relate to those of modern-day ‘military wives’.

Valeria Vitale joined the ICS in January 2017 as a Research Fellow on the A. W. Mellon funded project Pelagios Commons, for which she worked as Community Manager and part of the investigative team. After her degree in Communication Science awarded by La Sapienza University in Rome, she worked for several years on the study and promotion of tangible and intangible cultural heritage, with major Italian cultural institutions. In 2012 she graduated with an MA  in Digital Humanities at King’s College London, where she also completed her PhD on the use of Linked Open Data to document 3D visualisations of ancient cultural heritage. Her case study was the Temple of Isis in Pompeii, its variant restoration hypotheses and multiple cultural interpretations. Her doctoral research involved the development of a documentation standard for scholarly 3D visualisation called SCO3CH.

She has an extensive experience in teaching 3D tools and methods to humanists and showing how spatial technologies can enhance the study and understanding of the Past. Valeria has also collaborated with various digital projects that focus on ancient geography, including the Heritage gazetteer of Cyprus, i.Sicily, the Pleiades Gazetteer and  the Heritage Gazetteer of Libya. She co-directed the CALCS (Cross-cultural AfterLife of Classical Sites) project in 2016.

Simona Stoyanova joined the ICS as a non-stipendiary Research Fellow in March 2019. She currently works as a Research Associate on the epigraphic database of the ERC LatinNOW project based at the University of Nottingham.

After a BA in Classical Philology from Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski", Bulgaria, she pursued an MA in Classics and Digital Humanities at King's College London. She has worked in the field of Digital Classics since graduation, starting as a student assistant at KCL on two major digital epigraphy projects - Inscriptions of Roman Cyrenaica and IOSPE: Ancient Inscriptions of the Northern Black Sea, among others. In 2013 she joined the Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities at the University of Leipzig to work on the Open Greek and Latin (OGL) project as part of the Perseus Digital Library, and the research projects Digital Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum (DFHG) and Digital Marmor Parium. She returned to London in 2016 to work on IOSPE once more and later joined the ICS as a Research Fellow in Library and Information Science on the Cataloguing Open Access Classics Serials project (COACS).

She teaches classes and workshops on digital scholarly editing and textual criticism and digital encoding for epigraphy and papyrology, and provides TEI XML and EpiDoc consultancy for digitisation and electronic publishing of Ancient and Mediaeval primary sources. She is a co-author of the EpiDoc Guidelines for XML encoding of ancient documents.

Simona is currently pursuing a part-time PhD in Classics and Digital Humanities at King's College London on the palaeography of Greek and Latin inscriptions in the province of Thrace, and its exploration and presentation through a customised Archetype framework for epigraphers.

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.

Liz Potter manages the publications programme of the Institute, overseeing all aspects of the delivery of print and digital publications. She is currently working with a range of partner Institutes on the research and development of a suite of digital resources for the national and international classics communities.

Liz’s research and teaching lie broadly in the Hellenic tradition. Her first book develops research conducted at the Universities of London, Bristol and Oxford and at the British School of Athens, and is a study of British Hellenism from the mid-eighteenth century to the early twentieth. Her second research project explores rhetoric, performance and emotion in the Greco-Roman world: this develops postdoctoral research conducted in Oxford as part of the ERC-funded Emotions project, and as a postdoctoral fellow at the Center of Hellenic Studies, Washington DC. She teaches widely in ancient history and classical languages (Greek and Latin).

Liz also has a background in strategic and operational consultancy and project management. In the 1990s-early 2000s, she specialised in the impact of information and communications technology on the publishing process, working on digital publications and digital workflow management across a range of publishing sectors (academic, professional, reference, educational, STM and consumer). She was involved in large technical research projects and has written for publication on a variety of issues relating to technological change and its impact on publishers, libraries and archives.

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 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 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 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).

Maria Kekki is a part-time Library Assistant and is responsible for the binding of books and periodicals, as well as working on the front desk. She also catalogues historical manuscripts for the Bodleian Libraries. Before her present post she worked at Goldsmiths College, the British Library, and the Finnish Archaeological Institute and the Nordic Library in Athens. She originally studied History, Archaeology and Information Studies at the University of Helsinki and the School of Oriental and African Studies, and is a qualified librarian.