Prof. Rosalind Thomas BA (Oxon), MA (Oxon), PhD (Lond)

CUF Lecturer in Ancient History, Faculty of Classics
Fellow and Tutor in Classics, Balliol College

Balliol College
Oxford,
OX1 3BJ

Tel: (01865) 277749

rosalind.thomas@classics.ox.ac.uk

Profile

Ancient literacy, oral tradition and orality, performance culture; Greek law and society; Greek historiography, especially Herodotus, Thucydides; Greeks and barbarians, Greeks and the Persian Empire. She is currently working on the phenomenon of ‘local history’ and the polis.

Research Interests

Ancient literacy, oral tradition and orality, performance culture; Greek law and society; Greek historiography; Greeks and barbarians, Greeks and the Persian Empire, 'local history' and the polis.

Selected Recent Publications

1989: Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens, Cambridge University Press.
1992: Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece (Key Themes in Ancient History), CUP.
1994: 'Literacy and the city-state in archaic and classical Greece’, in Literacy and Power, ed. Alan Bowman and G. Woolf, CUP, 33-50.
1994: 'Law and the lawgiver in the Athenian democracy’, in Ritual, Finance, Politics. Athenian Democratic Accounts presented to David Lewis, ed. Robin Osborne and Simon Hornblower., Oxford, 119-133.
1995: 'Written in stone? Liberty, equality, orality and the codification of law’, BICS 40, 59-74.
1997: 'Ethnography, Proof and Argument in Herodotus’ Histories', PCPS 43, 128-48.
2000: Herodotus in Context: Ethnography, Science and the Art of Persuasion, CUP.
2001: 'Literacy in Ancient Greece: functional literacy, oral education and the development of a literate environment’, for volume on Literacy, Education and Social Development: On the Making of literate societies, ed. David Olson, Blackwell, 68-81.
2001: Herodotus and the Floating gap, in The Dawn of Historiography. Oral Traditions, uses of the past and the writing of history in fifth-century Greece, ed. N. Luraghi, OUP, 198-210.
2001: 'Ethnicity, Genealogy and Hellenism in Herodotus and Fifth-century Greece', Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity, ed. Irad Malkin.
2003: 'Prose performance texts: Epideixis and Written Publication in the late 5th. and early 4th.c.’, in H. Yunis, ed., Written Texts and the Rise of Literate Culture in Ancient Greece, CUP, 162-168.
2004: 'Herodotus, Ionia and the Athenian Empire', in The World of Herodotus, ed. V. Karageorghis and I.Taifacos, Cyprus, 27-42.
2005: 'Writing, law and written law', in Cambridge Companion to Greek Law, ed. M. Gagarin & D. Cohen, 41-60.
2005: Drew Gerstle, Rosalind Thomas & Stephanie Jones, eds., Performance Literature of special edition of journal Oral Tradition, 20.1-2.
2006: 'The Intellectual Milieu of Herodotus' for Cambridge Companion to Herodotus, ed. J. Marincola and C. Dewald, CUP, ch4, 60-75.
2006: 'Thucydides’ Intellectual Milieu and the Plague’, in Brill Companion to Thucydides, ed. A. Rengakos & Tsakmakis, Leiden, 87-108.
2007: 'Fame, Memorial and Choral poetry: the origins of epinician poetry - an historical study’, in Pindar’s Poetry, Patrons, and Festivals from Archaic Greece to the Roman Empire, ed. C. Morgan & S. Hornblower, OUP, 141-166.
2009: ‘Writing, Reading, public and private ‘literacies’: functional literacy and democratic literacy in Greece’, in volume ed. By Willian Johnson & Holt Parker, Ancient Literacies: the Culture of Reading in Greece and Rome., OUP, 13-45.
2011: In press: ‘And you, the demos, made an uproar’: Performance, mass audience and text in the Athenian Democracy’, in Literacy, Orality and Religion, ed. A. Lardinois & J. Blok, eds., Brill.
2011: In press: ‘Pindar’s “difficulty” and the performance of epinician poetry: some suggestions from ethnography’, for volume on Epinician Poetry, ed. Chris Carey, P. Agocs, R. Rawls., CUP.
2011: In press: ‘Thucydides and Social Change: between Akribeia and Universality’, in A. Lianeri, ed.,The Western Time of Ancient History: Historiographical Encounters with the Greek and Roman Pasts, CUP.
2011: In press: ‘Herodotus and Eastern myths and logoi: Deioces the Mede and Pythios the Lydian’, in M. de Bakker, E. Baragwanath, eds., Herodotus and Myth., OUP.
2011: In press: ‘Herodotus’ Persian Ethnography’, in R. Rollinger, ed., Herodotus and the Persian Empire., Innsbruck.

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