Professor, Chair of Arts Faculty
MA, D.Phil. (Oxon)

email address, please go to http://www.warwick.ac.uk/email_search/

Personal Profile:

Simon Swain was Head of Department from 00/01 to 06/07 and deputy Chair of the Arts Faculty 05-07. He took his first degree at Pembroke College, Oxford in 1980-84. His doctorate on ‘Plutarch and Rome’ was awarded 1988 at Wolfson College, Oxford. After various part-time teaching posts he was elected to a postdoctoral fellowship at All Souls College and came to Warwick in 1995. He is a member of AHRC Research Panel 1 (Classics & Archaeology). Simon is on research leave in the academic years 07-08 to 09-10 funded by the Leverhulme Trust (see below).

Research

Simon Swain works on the Greek culture and society of the Roman period including all aspects of the ‘second sophistic’. He has specific interests in literature and education and the politics of language usage, in the transformation of Greek culture in the later Roman Empire, and in the legacy of Greek thought among the Arabs. He has three current research focusses: (i) edition and study of Bryson’s Household Management, which is funded by the Leverhulme Trust; (ii) edition and study of a 10th c. collection of Greek and Arabic philosophy known as the “Oxford Anthology”; this work is funded by AHRC; (iii) the Warwick Epidemics, a joint project with Peter E. Pormann to edit and translate the Arabic version of Galen’s commentaries on Hippocrates’ Epidemics.

Teaching

Undergraduate:

• City of Rome (sole)
• Early Christianity (sole)
• Greek Culture & Society (contributes)
• Roman Culture & Society (contributes)
• Hellenistic World (contributes)
• Introduction to Greek and Roman History (contributes).

postgraduate:

Recent research degrees supervised include:

• The Novel of Joseph and Aseneth (MPhil/PhD)

Recent Publications

• ‘Rufus of Ephesus: Melancholy and Society', in P. E. Pormann (ed.), Rufus of Ephesus, “On Melancholy” (2008)
  
• Seeing the Face, Seeing the Soul. Polemon’s Physiognomy from Classical Antiquity to Medieval Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)
• Severan Culture (with J. Elsner and S. J. Harrison) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)