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King’s People

Biography

I read Classics and English at Magdalen College, Oxford, followed by an MA in Contemporary Art at the Courtauld Institute. I subsequently worked in the art world, combining freelance writing with a role at one of London’s leading contemporary galleries, Sadie Coles HQ. In 2017, I completed a PhD in Classics at Cambridge, examining the relationship between contemporary British art and the classical tradition. In January 2020, I joined King’s as an Early Career Fellow in the Department of Classics. I have co-curated exhibitions at King’s College London (‘The Classical Now’, 2018) and the Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge (‘RECASTING’, 2016). I was recently the lead author and consulting editor of a new book on classical myth in western art, Flying Too Close to the Sun (Phaidon, 2018). I write about art for publications including Apollo, The Burlington Magazine, The London Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement.

Research interests and PhD supervision

Ovid’s Metamorphoses; modern and contemporary art.

For more details, please see his full research profile.

Expertise and public engagement 

  • 2019 Lecture: ‘Retelling the Greek Myths’, Royal Academy, London, 17 November 2019
  • 2018 Lecture: ‘Narcissus, Oedipus and the Persistence of Memory’, Freud Museum, London, 13 November 2018.
  • 2018 Lecture: ‘James Cahill on the book Ways of Being’, London Book Fair, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 8 September 2018.
  • 2018 Lecture: ‘The Mythic Space’, Ways with Words Literary Festival, Dartington Hall, Devon, 11 July 2018.
  • Exhibition videos for Sadie Coles HQ, London: https://www.sadiecoles.com/video/

Selected publications

  • Flying Too Close to the Sun (London: Phaidon Press, 2018).
  • The Classical Now (London: Elephant Publishing, 2018), with Michael Squire and Ruth Allen.
  • ‘Portraits of Lucian Freud’, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 162, No. 1402, January 2020: 47-51.
  • ‘At Tate Britain: Frank Bowling’, London Review of Books, Vol. 41, No. 16, August 2019: 29.
  • ‘Review: Oscar Wilde and Classical Antiquity, edited by Kathleen Riley, Alastair J.L. Blanchard and Iarla Manny’, The Wildean, No. 54, January 2019: 99-105.