David Scourfield

MU

David Scourfield has been Professor of Classics at Maynooth University since 1998.  He was awarded his BA and DPhil degrees at the University of Oxford (1977, 1984), and after a period working in parliamentary administration in London, was appointed first to a lectureship and subsequently (1995) to the Jan Hofmeyr Chair of Classics at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.  In a varied career, in which he has taught across an unusually wide range (from Homer to the Arab conquest of north Africa and beyond), he has served as Chair of the Classical Association of South Africa (1997-8); Chair of Council of the Classical Association, the largest subject organization for Classics in the UK (2007-13); Vice-Chair of the Royal Irish Academy’s Committee for Classical and Near Eastern Studies (2010-13); and Chair of the American Philological Association’s Committee on Classical Tradition and Reception (2013-14).  He was joint-editor of Classical Review from 2002 to 2005.  His research, which embraces both literature and ancient social and cultural history, has four main emphases: (a) bereavement and consolation in the ancient world; (b) the literature of late Antiquity; (c) the Greek and Roman novel; (d) twentieth-century receptions of the classical world, especially in English literature from 1900 to 1939.  He has recently published (with Monica Gale of Trinity College Dublin) Texts and Violence in the Roman World (Cambridge, 2018), a volume on representations of violence in Latin literature, while current projects include a monograph on E. M. Forster’s engagement with Classics and classical Antiquity.