Classics
Staff

Dr Gavin Kelly

Gavin.Kelly@ed.ac.uk
0131 650 3581
Room 1.11, Doorway 4, Teviot Place

Senior Lecturer in Classics (Latin Literature), Classics subject area

I first thought Classics was fun at the age of 9, when I saw a repeat of I Claudius on TV; these peculiar feelings were soon reinforced by a Penguin translation of Livy in my school library. History as literature and history from literature are still what interest me most. After finishing my first degree at Gonville and Caius, Cambridge, in 1996, I moved successively to Oxford for the MPhil and Doctorate, and to Reseach Fellowships at Cambridge (Peterhouse this time) and Manchester before arriving here in 2005.

My scholarship has centred on Ammianus Marcellinus, the historian of the fourth century AD. I have aimed to reconnect him to the Latin historiographical tradition of Sallust and Tacitus, to bring out the skill and manipulation of his writing, to make Latinists admire him and to save historians from being duped by him. My half a dozen or so articles published or forthcoming in journals and collections include ‘Ammianus and the great tsunami’, which appeared with ominous timing in the Journal of Roman Studies in November 2004. Ammianus Marcellinus: The Allusive Historian was published by Cambridge University Press in 2008.

The future

In 2010-11 I held a Fellowship at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina to work on a book on the fifth-century poet Rutilius Namatianus. I am interested in several other later Latin poets (especially Claudian), Tacitus and his contemporaries, representation of emperors in Roman literature, source criticism, and Rome and Constantinople in the fourth to sixth centuries. On the last subject, I organised a three-day panel at the Celtic Classics Conference in Lampeter in September 2006, and a follow-up event on Constantinople here in Edinburgh in May 2007, in collaboration with my colleague Lucy Grig. The resulting collection of essays (entitled Two Romes) is to be published by Oxford University Press (New York) in 2012.