Professor Daniel Orrells

I studied Classics at undergraduate and postgraduate levels at the University of Cambridge. I taught at the University of Warwick for eleven years, including two years as a Humboldt Fellow at the Humboldt University in Berlin. I joined King’s College London in 2015.

Research Interests

My research focuses on the history of the interpretation of classical literature. More specifically, I examine the literary, scholarly and cultural receptions of Greek and Latin literature from the Renaissance to the beginning of the twentieth century. My research specialisms can be grouped under the following headings:

• Classical literature and literary/critical theory
• Modern European literature and classical antiquity
• History of gender and sexuality and the ancient world
• Classics and Postcolonial literature and theory
• Classics and Aesthetics

I have supervised a range of MA and PhD students on classical literature and classical reception studies. I would be very happy to hear from potential students interested in Greek literature and literary/critical theory and the reception of Greek and Roman literature and modern intellectual and literary history.

Expertise and public engagement

I have given public lectures at museums and schools.

Selected publications

Antiquity in Print. Visualising Ancient Greece in the Eighteenth Century (Bloomsbury, 2024).

Freud's Antiquity: Object, Idea, Desire, co-edited with Richard Armstrong and Miriam Leonard (Freud Museum, 2023).

Richard Marsh, Popular Fiction and Literary Culture, 1890-1915: Rereading the Fin de Siècle, co-edited with Victoria Margree and Minna Vuohelainen (Manchester University Press, 2018)

The Mudimbe Reader, co-edited with Pierre-Philippe Fraiture (University of Virginia Press, 2016)

Sex: Antiquity and Its Legacy (Oxford University Press USA, 2015)

African Athena: New Agendas, co-edited with Gurminder K. Bhambra and Tessa Roynon (Oxford University Press, 2011)

Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity (Oxford University Press, 2011)