Dissertation title 2013/14 and 2014/15
Dissertation titles have been grouped under each MA programme. Some dissertations are
more interdisciplinary and would suit more than one MA. For example, the first dissertation
listed would also have been a suitable topic for a student on the MA in Classical Art and
Archaeology.
Classics
• The identity of Potnia and her role in the Mycenean society and economy. [or CA]
• Eleusinian Mysteries, initiation and imagery of rape. [or AH]
• Greek views on the power and nature of the lyre, and its use as a symbol in poetry and
philosophy.
• Space and dramaturgy in Aeschylus' Suppliant Women.
• The Poetics of meta-theatre in Sophocles' Philoctetes.
• The Sophoclean Odysseus: studies in the variability of an inherited character.
• Human sacrifice in Aeschylus and Euripides.
• Religion, myth and ritual in Aristophanes Thesmorphoriazusae and Frogs.
• Orpheus and the sirens: a reading of Apollonius' Argonautica 4.885-921.
• The use of three terms in Herodotus - τύραννος, βασιλεύς, μούναρχος. [or AH]
• Alexander and Achilles: between Arrian and Homer.
• Power and Performance: actors, acting and the dynamics of power in late Republican and
early Imperial Rome. [or AH]
• Mirrors as a literary device in Latin literature.
• Virgil's characterisation of Mezentius.
• Statius’ use of Aeschylus in the Thebaid.
• Constructing a good emperor: The treatment of Vespasian in Suetonius' Lives of the
Caesars. [or AH]
• The trustworthiness of the literary accounts of Hadrian’s personality. [or AH]
• Roman medicine as practised on the battlefield. [or AH]
• Marlowe's Tamburlaine and Virgil's Aeneid.
• Interpretation of Horace in seventeeth-century poetry in England.
• Tennyson's reception of Vergil.
Ancient History
• The relationship between religion and society within Sparta.
• The development of cavalry during the Peloponnesian War in relation to the defence of
Athens.
• The mothers of Athens: the perpetuation of the maternal bloodline in the Eumenides and
the Ion. [or CL]
• Art, arete and courage in Athens: performance of individual and collective identities in the
Classical Age. [or CL]
• The implications for sacred experience of the use of frontality in classical depictions of
Dionysus. [or CL or CA]
• How did the Carthaginians interact with their neighbours?
• The economic consequences of the annona from Gaius Gracchus to Augustus.
• Concepts of masculinity in Roman period. [or CL]
• Interpreting the manes: the sum of the Roman dead.
• How did Caligula and Nero use spectacle and performance to define the nature of their
imperium?
• Vespasian's rise to power and the Jewish Wars.
• Perceptions of criminality in Roman pastoral communities in South Italy during the 1st and
2nd centuries AD.
• What was the relationship between Rome and the provincials under Nero and Claudius?
• The role of 'associations' (sunodoi) in Roman Egypt (I-II AD).
• Jewish magic C2nd-C4th AD.
• Conflict and confluence of Christianity and paganism in Late Latin poetry. [or CL]
• Debate between Orthodox and Montanist and metaphorical veiling language.
• How were the legends of Alexander the Great retold at the edges of the world?
• The Historical Formation of the Sardanapalus Legend
Classical Art and Archaeology
• Representations of sleep in Classical art.
• Late Archaic votive masks at Orthia.
• Representation of sphinxes in Late Archaic Greece.
• Narrative and dramatic tension in the sculptural decoration of the Temple of Zeus at
Olympia.
• The Hellenistic painted grave stelai from Demetrias.
• The musical symposium. [or CL]
• Portrayal of women in Etruscan wallpainting.
• Domus Augustana: evolution of the imperial palace. [or AH]
• Monuments on Roman coins: a case study of triumphal arches.
• Late Antique pilgrimage in eastern Mediterranean. [or AH]
• Early Roman London: the evolution of the city.
• The display and interpretation of Roman mosaics in London.
Late Antique and Byzantine Studies
• How and why did Justinian's law reform programme evolve in the way that it did in the
520's and 530's, and was it more preservation or revolution?
• How were accounts of women’s paths to sainthood shaped by the genre of hagiography?
• Economy in the Byzantine Empire, 9th-10th centuries.
• The use of relics.
• Mental Illness in Byzantium.
• Theodore Abu-Qurrah and early Islam.