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Staff profile

Overview

Professor Edmund Richardson

Professor

Affiliations
Affiliation
Professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History
Member of the Institute for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies

Biography

I’m a historian of ancient Greece and its afterlives: from Egyptian tales of Alexander the Great to ancient drama on Broadway. I'm fascinated by characters on the edges of many histories: the forgotten stories which change the way we see the world.

My next book, Alexander: God, King, Man will be published in June 2026. In 336 BCE, at the age of twenty, Alexander, a wide-eyed boy from the hills of Macedon, inherited a tumbledown kingdom, a pile of debts and an army which answered to nobody. Desperate to hold on to power, he led the army east, into the heart of the vast Persian Empire, and inadvertently began the greatest military campaign in history. The young man became a king, the king became a hero, the hero became a living god, and the god died aged thirty-two, broken-hearted in Babylon. Alexander is based on a decade of research on four continents. 'Alexander rides again into battle in this dazzling new masterpiece by one of our most talented young classicists... Impossibly colourful, wonderfully well written and drawing on some extraordinary new sources, this is biography of great brilliance and rare resonance' (William Dalrymple). 'Meticulously researched and dazzlingly written, Richardson's Alexander is a triumph of scholarship and storytelling. The text is so lively, the insights so revealing, I felt as if I was reading about Alexander for the first time' (Toby Wilkinson).

Alexandria: The Quest for the Lost City, published in 2021, explored how the lost city of Alexandria Beneath the Mountains, in Afghanistan, was discovered by the most unlikely person imaginable: Charles Masson, an ordinary working-class boy from London, turned deserter, spy, doctor, archaeologist and scholar. On the way into one of history's most extraordinary stories, Masson would take tea with kings, travel with holy men and become the master of a hundred disguises. He would change the world, and the world would destroy him. Alexandria was reviewed by the New York Times, the Guardian, the Times, the Spectator and the Daily Telegraph. It was translated into German, Spanish, Dutch and Russian, and was named one of the books of the year for 2021 by the Spectator, the Daily Telegraph, Open Magazine (India) and the Sydney Morning Herald.

In 2016, I was named one of the AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinkers - one of ten academics selected to work with the BBC to develop programs based on their research. I've broadcast on everything from Victorian ghost-hunters to the search for Alexander the Great's tomb. I'm always delighted to speak to schools and other external groups, about topics from Alexander the Great's lost cities to Victorian con-artists. You can read an interview about my work with the Guardian here.

Before joining the Department as a Lecturer in 2013, I was Hannah Seeger Davis Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Princeton, in the Program in Hellenic Studies (2009-10), Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Durham (2010-12) and Lecturer at the University of Leeds (2012-13). I completed my Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge (2008).

My work explores, in different ways, how people form relationships with the past – and the fragile wonder of those relationships. I'm always delighted to receive enquiries from prospective PhD students and postdoctoral researchers interested in classical reception and the afterlives of the ancient world.

My next project, ‘The Ghost Collectors,’ is the story of how, in the year of Jack the Ripper, an infamous con-artist and a frustrated mystery-writer set out to defeat death.

Research interests

  • Classical Reception Studies
  • Alexander the Great
  • Historiography
  • Tragedy and Performance

Publications

Authored book

Chapter in book

  • Classics and the Victorians
    Richardson, E. (2017). Classics and the Victorians. In D. L. Clayman (Ed.), Oxford bibliographies. Classics. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780195389661-0283
  • The Emperor’s Caesar: Napoleon III, Karl Marx and the History of Julius Caesar
    Richardson, E. (2016). The Emperor’s Caesar: Napoleon III, Karl Marx and the History of Julius Caesar. In T. Fögen & R. Warren (Eds.), Graeco-Roman antiquity and the idea of nationalism in the 19th century : case studies. (pp. 113-130). De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110473490-006
  • Ghostwritten Classics.
    Richardson, E. (2016). Ghostwritten Classics. In S. Butler (Ed.), Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception (pp. 221-238). Bloomsbury Academic.
  • The Harmless Impudence of a Revolutionary: Radical Classics in 1850s London
    Richardson, E. (2015). The Harmless Impudence of a Revolutionary: Radical Classics in 1850s London. In H. Stead & E. Hall (Eds.), Greek and Roman classics in the British struggle for social reform. (pp. 79-98). Bloomsbury.
  • Political Writing and Class.
    Richardson, E. (2015). Political Writing and Class. In N. Vance & J. Wallace (Eds.), The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, Volume 4: 1780-1880. (pp. 103-129). Oxford University Press.
  • Of Doubtful Antiquity
    Richardson, E. (2013). Of Doubtful Antiquity. In A. Swenson & P. Mandler (Eds.), From Plunder to Preservation: Britain and the Heritage of Empire, c.1800-1940. Oxford University Press.
  • Jude the Obscure: Oxford's Classical Outcasts
    Richardson, E. (2007). Jude the Obscure: Oxford’s Classical Outcasts. In C. Stray (Ed.), Oxford Classics. Duckworth.

Edited book

Journal Article

Supervision students

Meg Finlayson