The Roman Society

Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

Council Members

Elected June 2025

Dr Dalida (Lili) Agri teaches Classics at Newnham College, Cambridge. She works on the literature, philosophy, and culture of ancient Greek and Roman societies, with a particular focus on how emotion, ethics, gender, and politics intersect. Her research often draws connections between ancient thought and questions that remain pressing today. Recent publications include Reading Fear in Flavian Epic: Emotion, Power, and Stoicism (Oxford University Press, 2022) and “The Clothing Metaphor in Roman Depictions of Emotion” (2024, open access). She is currently co-editing an interdisciplinary volume on Gender and Emotion in the Ancient World with Professor Giulia Sissa, and preparing a commentary on Book 5 of Silius Italicus’ Punica.

Martin Beddoe  read Classics and Law at Cambridge in the 1970s. After a career at the criminal bar followed by 15 years as a Circuit Judge in London, he retired in 2022 to return to Classics.  He completed a Masters in 2024 at KCL where he is now undertaking a PhD in Roman Archaeology.

Kim Drummond is Head of Classics and Latin at St Edmund’s School in Hindhead, an independent school in Surrey. In addition to leading the department, she teaches GCSE Classical Civilisation and Latin, and runs co-curricular clubs and workshops designed to enrich and extend students’ engagement with the ancient world. Kim also organises annual study tours to major classical sites, including Rome, Pompeii, Athens, Olympia, and Sparta. Prior to joining St Edmund’s, Kim was a Classics lecturer at Chichester College, where she taught both A Level students and adults. During this time, she designed and delivered two original adult education courses on Ancient Rome, accompanied by study visits to Rome, Pompeii, and Tunisia. Kim came to Classics teaching following a 23-year career in the Royal Navy. Her academic interests focus on Roman architecture and urban topography; her Master’s dissertation examined the Colossus of Nero within the framework of the continuity versus break hypothesis.

Dr Kelsey Shawn Madden is a Roman archaeologist and an Early Career Research Associate at the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London. Kelsey’s interdisciplinary work combines history, archaeology, and art history, employing feminist, queer, postcolonial, and new materialist theories. She specialises in enslavement, gender, and childhood in the first and second centuries CE, as well as Roman funerary practices and urbanism.
Kelsey has extensive experience managing archaeological projects in the UK and Italy. Currently, she is the fieldwork supervisor and collaborative researcher for the British School at Rome on the Falerii Novi Project. Additionally, she is co-editor of the volume Sexual Effects: Mapping Intersections of Sexuality and Imperialism in the Roman World, to be published by Bloomsbury Publishing in winter 2025. 

Dr Martha Stewart is Executive Assistant to the Dean of Durham Cathedral. She read Classics Mods and Ancient & Modern History at Christ Church, Oxford, and was recently awarded a PhD in Roman Archaeology from Durham University. She holds an honorary research fellowship at Durham, and plans to continue researching and writing in the history of archaeology. Her first monograph, on Eric Birley and his legacy to Roman Frontier Studies, will be published by Archaeopress in 2026.

 

Elected June 2024

Dr Victoria Leonard is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities at Coventry University. She joined the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London, as a Research Associate in 2017, and became a Research Fellow in 2020. Victoria’s research focuses on the Roman and Late Roman western Mediterranean, with a special interest in historiography, ancient religion, and gender, sexuality, violence, and theories of the body in antiquity. She is the author of In Defiance of History: Orosius and the Unimproved Past (2022) and co-editor of Bodily Fluids in Antiquity (2021). Her media work includes writing for The Guardian and The Times Higher Education, and she has contributed to BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking.

Dr Luke Houghton is Lecturer in Latin at the University of Edinburgh. His research concentrates primarily on the reception of Roman poetry in later art and literature, especially during the later Middle Ages and early Renaissance. He is the author of Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue in the Italian Renaissance (2019) and has co-edited four volumes: Perceptions of Horace (with Maria Wyke, 2009), Neo-Latin Poetry in the British Isles (with Gesine Manuwald, 2012), Virgil and Renaissance Culture (with Marco Sgarbi, 2018), and An Anthology of British Neo-Latin Literature (with Gesine Manuwald and Lucy Nicholas, 2020). He is editor of Proceedings of the Virgil Society, and his translation of Marco Girolamo Vida’s influential sixteenth-century Latin epic, the Christiad, is in preparation for the Oxford World’s Classics series.

Dr Adam Rogers is an academic at the University of Leicester that specialises in Roman archaeology. His research and teaching focuses particularly on the Roman West and Britain in the Roman era. He also has interests in urbanism and settlement in the Roman period, landscapes, materiality and hoards, historiography and archaeological theory. He has published a number of books on his research including Late Roman Towns in Britain: Rethinking Change and Decline (Cambridge University Press 2011), Water and Roman Urbanism: Towns, Waterscapes, Land Transformation and Experience in Roman Britain (Brill 2013), The Archaeology of Roman Britain: Biography and Identity (Routledge 2015), Iron Age and Roman Coin Hoards in Britain (co-authored, Oxbow Books 2020) and Roman Towns (Amberley 2023).

James King-Smith is a retired barrister who read Literae Humaniores at St. John's College, Oxford, matriculating in 1973. James' special subject in Latin literature was the poet Horace and he is currently a member of the Horatian Society.

Micaela Langellotti is Senior Lecturer in Ancient History at Newcastle University. Her research focuses on the social, cultural and economy history of Egypt under Roman rule. She is the author of Village Life in Roman Egypt. Tebtunis in the First Century AD (OUP 2020) and the co-editor of Village Institutions in Egypt in the Roman to the Early Arab period (with D.W. Rathbone, OUP 2020). She is currently preparing the first edition of an archive of Greek documents written on papyrus which were produced at a local notary office in the Roman Fayum, Egypt. She is on the editorial board of the book series Pragmateiai, Edipuglia, specialising in the socio-economic history of the ancient world.

 

Elected June 2023

Professor Rebecca Langlands is Professor of Classics at the University of Exeter, with research specialisms in Latin literature, Roman cultural history, ethics and exemplarity, sexuality and gender, and reception of the classical world. Her books include Sexual Morality in Ancient Rome (2006), Sex, Knowledge, and Receptions of the Past (edited with Kate Fisher, 2015), Exemplary Ethics in Ancient Rome (2018) and Literature and Culture in the Roman Empire, 96-235. Cross-Cultural Interactions (edited with Alice König and James Uden, 2020). She is founder and co-director of two interdisciplinary research centres, the Sexual Knowledge Unit and the Centre for Classical Reception. She is also founder and director of the award-winning Sex & History project, which develops innovative sex education resources based on historical materials, and informs practice and policy throughout the UK and worldwide.

Dr Ellen O’Gorman is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Bristol and Director of the Bristol Institute for Greece, Rome, and the Classical Tradition. She works on the literature, politics, and culture of Rome in the 1st-2nd century AD; her current project seeks to understand the rhetorical use of sententiae as aesthetic objects which disseminate thought. Recent publications include her monograph on Tacitus’ History of Politically Effective Speech, the new Oxford Classical Dictionary entry on the historian Tacitus, and an article on ‘Embedded Speech and the Embodied Speaker in Roman Historiography’.  

Costas Panayotakis is Professor of Latin at the University of Glasgow. He researches on fragmentary Roman comic drama (especially mime and Atellane comedy) and Latin fiction, and is author of Theatrum Arbitri: Theatrical Elements in the Satyrica of Petronius (Leiden, 1995) and Decimus Laberius: The Fragments (Cambridge, 2010). He is currently preparing critical editions (with facing translation and commentary) of the fragments of Atellane comedy, the sayings (sententiae) associated with the mimographer Publilius, and the episode from Petronius’ Satyricon known as ‘Dinner at Trimalchio’s’.

Dr Hannah Platts is a Senior Lecturer in Ancient History and Archaeology at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her main research focuses on Roman domestic space, whilst a second strand of study examines multisensory experiences of the past. Her most recent book Multisensory Living in Ancient Rome: Power and Space in Roman Houses (pub. Bloomsbury 2019) explores the role of the bodily sensations of smell, sound, taste and touch, as well as sight, in Roman houses. An important aspect of Hannah’s interest in multisensory history examines how embodied experience at historic and heritage sites can help widen visitor access to the past whilst also giving audiences the opportunity to explore history from different perspectives. To explore these questions, Hannah has collaborated on numerous projects exploring the roles of immersive digital technologies (including virtual reality and augmented reality) and multisensory experience in the heritage and museum sector.

James Renshaw teaches Classics at Godolphin and Latymer School in Hammersmith, which offers all four classical A Levels in the 6th form as well as IB Latin and Greek. He also runs the school’s Ancient World Breakfast Club, a community project which provides a weekly talk during term-time, and which is open to any member of the public. As well as teaching, James has written a number of educational textbooks, and is the general editor for the OCR/Bloomsbury suite of endorsed textbooks for the Ancient History and Classical Civilisation qualifications at GCSE and A Level. He has also worked for the OCR exam board as a marker and trainer in Ancient History, Classical Civilisation, and Latin, and is currently the OCR trainer for Ancient History A Level.

Dr Claire Stocks holds a lectureship for Literary Culture and Heritage at the University of Amsterdam. Prior to this, she was Senior Lecturer for Classics at the University of Newcastle (2016-2023), and held lectureships at Radboud University, Nijmegen (2012-2016) and the University of Manchester (2011-2012). Her research centres on two main areas: Roman literature, culture and memory studies and digital humanities (especially games) with a particular focus on how audiences conceptualize the past. Most recently she has worked with the Vindolanda Trust and Creative Assembly (makers of the Total War video game series) to produce the web-based game and online exhibition 'Vindolanda Adventure' (https://www.vindolanda.com/vindolanda-adventure). She was also the co-curator for an exhibition on the Emperor Domitian ('God on Earth: Emperor Domitian') in the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden, December 2021 - May 2022, and in Rome, Capitoline Museums, July 2022 - January 2023.

Emma Stuart is Museum Director at the Corinium Museum but has been employed in various roles at the museum since 2008. Her focus at the museum has been the Roman Mosaics and she now has a portfolio of five lectures on this topic and re-issued the Mosaics Guidebook in June 2022. Prior to working at the Corinium Museum, she worked as Heritage Officer for Chester City Council manging an extensive photographic archive and celebrating the Roman heritage of the City, alongside other periods. During this time she assisted Keith Matthews on a summer dig at the amphitheatre and Mary Lewry with the City’s Summer and Winter Watch parades. Her academic background includes a degree in Theology and World Religions, a Masters Degree in Landscape History and a Masters Degree in Museum Studies, each contributing to the career path she follows today. Emma has had a small number of TV appearances including interviews sharing the stunning archaeological collections in the Corinium Museum on Points West, Bargain Hunt and Antiques Road Trip.


Lili Agri


Martin Beddoe


Kim Drummond


Kelsey Madden


Martha Stewart


Victoria Leonard

 

Luke Houghton

Adam Rogers

James King-Smith

Micaela Langellotti


Rebecca Langlands

Ellen O'Gorman

Costas Panayotakis

Hannah Platts

James Renshaw

Claire Stocks

Emma Stuart

The Roman Society
Senate House
Malet Street
London WC1E 7HU

Telephone: 020 7862 8727

Email: office@romansociety.org

The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies (The Roman Society) is a registered charity in the UK.

Charity Registration Number: 210644
Company Registration Number: 114442