ORCID #: 0000-0001-7411-9328

Research Interests

• Ancient Greek mobilities, migrations and diasporas; interregional and intercultural contact; global antiquity
• Empires in Sicily, Italy, and the pre-Roman Western Mediterranean
• Multi- and interdisciplinary methods and theories (esp. combining texts and material culture); cross-cultural, comparative, and anthropological and sociological methods and theories
• Ancient and modern historiographies for these research interests (esp. the inappropriate application of modern concepts of settler colonialism, race and racism, centre and margin/periphery, etc. to the ancient world)
• Decolonizing the Classics and reception of the ancient world in the New World, including in British Columbia

Research Areas

• Greek (Language)
• Roman Studies
• Greek Studies
• Near Eastern Studies
• Archaeology and Material Culture
• Reception
• Translation
• Literature
• Culture and Identity
• Historiography
• Religions

Research

For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the history of the ancient Greek world was widely studied on the basis of a few favoured questions and states (most notably Athens and Sparta).   Since I was a graduate student in the 1990s, my research has sought to broaden the study of Greek history by grappling with a greater variety of questions and states beyond the traditional canon. What factors created the canon and how did change come about? What was life like in Greek states other than Athens and Sparta, especially in regions outside Greece, where environmental and ethnic conditions were usually quite different? How, in other words, did Greek mobilities, migrations, and diasporas contribute to the development of the ancient Greek world as a whole?  And, by extension, how culturally diverse was the ancient Greek world? What social and economic factors underpinned the traditional political and military narratives commonly encountered in standard narratives of ancient Greek history? When and under what circumstances did state formation arrive in Greece, the context within which civilization developed in the Greek world? These questions have formed the basis of my research activities.  Answering them requires a broad interdisciplinary approach, in the tradition first developed in Oxford in the 1930s by the Greek historian, Alan Blakeway. It is one which moves freely and fluidly between the disciplines of philology, history, and archaeology in order to combine texts and material culture in an equal and complementary manner in the full realization that no one form of evidence can on its own tell us everything we need to know about the ancient world. To quote the late David Ridgway: “Blakeway’s starting point was new, as was his method: that of the historian who was willing to learn not only the vocabulary of archaeology but the grammar and syntax as well” (in J.-P. Descoeudres [ed.], Greek Colonists and Native Populations [Oxford 1990], p. 61).  My overall aim is to write a new, more comprehensive Greek history, using the just described interdisciplinary approach.  My research has taken four interrelated directions.

The first direction has involved re-evaluating the history of Greek Sicily.  The island of Sicily is attractive for this purpose because of its size (a quasi-continent) and location at the very crossroads of the Mediterranean.  The island also had an impressive mix of cultures (indigenous, Greek, and Phoenician in particular) and geographical features that made it stand out compared to the Greek homeland.  For these reasons, ancient Sicily provides a fertile research environment for the application of decolonizing and postcolonial approaches and opens wider horizons in the history of ancient Greece.  My research on Greek Sicily has resulted in two books and three archaeological monograph reports.  The first book, based on my doctoral thesis at Oxford University, was published in 2003 in the monograph series of the Oxford University School of Archaeology as Megara Hyblaia and Selinous: The Development of Two Greek City-States in Archaic Sicily.   The choice of the Archaic Megarian city-states in Sicily allowed me to focus on their divergent evolution and to show that even within the island of Sicily–a relatively small area (about 25,000 square kilometres) in comparison with the ancient Greek world as a whole–city-states could develop in different ways, and that there was regionalism within regionalism.   My second book on Greek Sicily has extended, both in terms of chronological periods and geographical coverage, the narrower subject-matter of the thesis-book to writing the first ever full-scale social and economic history of Greek Sicily in the Archaic and Classical periods. This book, entitled Archaic and Classical Greek Sicily: A Social and Economic History, was published in 2016 in the series “Greeks Overseas” based in the New York office of Oxford University Press.  The three archaeological monograph reports were commissioned by The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies (London) and The British School at Athens and reviewed advances in archaeological and historical research relating to Greek Sicily (including the Byzantine period) for the fifteen years spanning 1996 to 2010.

The second direction has involved pursuing cross-cultural and comparative perspectives to the study of Greek antiquity. The underlying premise here is that one cannot re-evaluate a particular region of the ancient world without re-evaluating the larger whole to which this part of the “puzzle” belongs.  To this end, three projects have recently engaged my energies.  One concerns an international conference that I organized called “Regionalism and Globalism in Antiquity” held in Vancouver in March 2007.  Professor Lord Colin Renfrew of Cambridge University delivered the keynote lecture, and fifty-six speakers from all over the world were chosen on a blind peer-review system.  I have edited and contributed an introductory essay to the volume of 14 peer-reviewed essays recently published with Peeters Publishers in Leuven entitled Regionalism and Globalism in Antiquity: Exploring their Limits.  The second project is another book that has recently been published called A Companion to Greeks Across the Ancient World for the series Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World published by Wiley-Blackwell.  This book takes stock of the unprecedented growth and development of knowledge and approaches over the past three decades and fills a gap in scholarship by providing an up-to-date account of the ancient Greeks outside their homelands from the Early Iron Age to the Hellenistic world forged out of Alexander the Great’s conquests.  The third project regards my involvement in Seshat: Global History Databank, for which I co-authored the chapter “The Greco-Roman Mediterranean” for the recently published book The Seshat History of the Axial Age.

The third direction in my research is now attempting to bring together the latter two directions into a single whole.  The basic premise here is to re-evaluate the conjunction of regional trajectories, especially those of the Eastern and Western Mediterranean from the Early Iron Age to the development of Roman control over the entire Mediterranean basin.  One question in particular is guiding this research: Who were the main shakers and movers in the cultural development of pre-Roman Italy?  For over a century modern scholars have envisaged one answer. Immigrants from the East, especially Greeks, and to a lesser degree Phoenicians, were the dominant drivers in this development, bringing cities, metal-working technology, and in general higher culture to passive and inferior native Italian populations in the eighth century BC. But since the 1990s this picture has been dramatically challenged, particularly through the growth and interpretation of prehistoric archaeological data in Etruria and Sardinia. This evidence demonstrates that these two regions were already highly developed as prehistoric powerhouses, not dependent on immigrant stimuli for their initial rise to power. They acted, therefore, as magnets that attracted Greeks and Phoenicians to their regions.  The aim of this project is to produce a book which will rethink the part played by the “Greek Miracle” in the cultural development of pre-Roman Western Mediterranean and to suggest some new solutions to this old problem.  The working title of this book project is “From Backwardness to Leapfrogging?  Rethinking Cultural Transfers in the Pre-Roman Western Mediterranean.”   This book project is under contract with Oxford University Press.

The fourth and most recent direction builds on my work on ancient Greek Sicily and on ancient Greek migrations and diasporas.  New World settler colonialism has often evoked comparisons with Greek, Roman, and Old World antiquity in general.  This new research seeks to move beyond the piecemeal discussion of Old World antiquity in the New World of North America, which is usually restricted to place-names (such as Syracuse, New York), neo-classical aesthetics and architecture, and literature.  Instead, I seek to establish a more comprehensive and systematic intellectual framework which connects Old World Antiquity with Europe’s exploration and settlement of (to them) the New World in the 16^th to 20^th centuries of our era.  As is well known, this exploration and settlement resulted in a significant expansion of human experiences with which Europeans could understand their past and imagine their futures.  Ancient Greece and Rome served as a major source of inspiration in these respects because of their importance to European education and identity.  Thus a two-way dialogue emerged, one in which Europeans regularly made parallels between their exploration and settlement of the New World with understanding ancient Greek and Roman history and, vice versa, the role ancient Greece and Rome played in providing parallels with imagining how life in the New World might one day become.  This research investigates both these kinds of parallels and the motivations for them, especially those derived from ancient Greece, as well as assessing the distortions and possibilities raised by such parallels.  The working title of this project is “Circular Conquests: The New World and Classical Antiquity” for which a book contract is in preparation for the monograph series “The New Antiquity” published by Palgrave Macmillan.  Some of the preliminary results have been published as a chapter called “Anthropology and the Creation of the Classical Other” in Brill’s Companion to Classics and Early Anthropology and as the “Preface” to the book The Fight for Greek Sicily: Society, Politics, and Landscape, where I compare ancient Greek Sicily to the frontier period of modern British Columbia.

As part of my research, I have always travelled extensively to visit ancient sites and museums and have also taken part in excavations and field surveys in Greece, Italy, and Britain, such as working alongside Stanford University on the acropolis of Monte Polizzo in Western Sicily.  The underlying philosophy is that to be a good historian one must get out of one’s arm-chair and obtain as much hands-on experience as possible to write about the past.

For full details, see my CV.

Supervision

I am interested in supervising motivated and well-trained students doing research in my areas of specialization. Over the years, I have supervised and co-supervised both undergraduate and graduate students in writing their B.A. honours theses, M.A. theses and graduating papers, and Ph.D. theses. The topics have included Greek banqueting practices in their Mediterranean context, Archaic and Classical Greek altars, early Greek kinship, the cults of Greek founders, emporia as places of economic and religious interaction, Greek water cults and divinities, Diodorus Siculus, the gerousia at Ephesus, and Etruscan state formation. My students, if wanting to pursue their education, have earned spots in prominent graduate programs (such as those at the University of Michigan, Yale University, Stanford University, the University of Texas at Austin, Oxford University, Cambridge University, and the University of Chicago) and have garnered top awards and prizes from university and external sources during and after their studies (such as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the German Academic Exchange Service [DAAD], the Trudeau Foundation, and the Etruscan Foundation, as well as being shortlisted for Rhodes Scholarships). On completion, these students have succeeded in finding jobs, such as in the Department of Classics at Dalhousie University, the Department of Humanities at Grant MacEwan University, the Department of Classical, Near Eastern, and Religious Studies at the University of British Columbia, and Memorial University of Newfoundland. I always look forward to hearing from potential students.