• BA in History and Latin, University of Copenhagen (Denmark)
• Cand.mag. (MA) in History and Latin, University of Copenhagen (Denmark)
• M.St. in Greek/Roman History, University of Oxford
• D.Phil in Ancient History, University of Oxford

I have been fortunate to experience a number of great universities and academic institutions such as the University of Copenhagen (where I was an undergraduate and graduate student in the then Department of History and Department of Latin and Greek), Brasenose College, Oxford (as a Master’s and doctoral student), Merton College and St John’s College, Oxford (as Lecturer in Ancient History), Wolfson College, Oxford (as Research Fellow), and the University of Glasgow (as Research Fellow and then Lecturer in Classics). I have been at the University of Birmingham since September 2016.

I enjoy teaching all aspects of Roman history.

My courses include:

First year

• A dangerous plot: the Catilinarian Conspiracy in late Roman Republican context

Second and third year

• Roman Oratorical Culture
• Republican Rome: From the Gracchi to Caesar
• Understanding Ancient Societies
• The End of the Roman Republic and the Age of Augustus
• The Age of Cicero

Postgraduate

• Research and Scholarship
• The City in the Greco-Roman World
• Ideas, Ideals and Ideologies

I welcome proposals for supervision in any aspect of Roman History, especially political life in the Roman republic or any aspect of Roman/Latin oratory and rhetoric.

I have supervised PhD students working on an anonymous rhetorical work from the Roman republican period, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, on ‘Roman’ speeches in the work of the Greek historian Dio Cassius, on popular power in the late Roman Republic, on communicative failure in Latin epic, on Sallust's Cicero compared with Luke's St Paul, and on Cicero's De Senectute. I have also supervised a number of Master’s students (MA and MRes) on a range of Roman history topics.

I currently supervise the following PhD and research students:

Ben Salisbury, ‘Before Public Opinion: The Role of Tribunes of the Plebs in Creating, Manipulating, and Responding to Popular Sentiment in the Late Roman Republic (c. 70 – 49 BC)’ (supervising with Dr Hannah Cornwell)

Ashley Chhibber, ‘Heroism and the Failure to Communicate in the epics of Rome (Aeneid, Bellum Civile and Punica)’ (supervising with Professor Helen Lovatt, University of Nottingham)

Joshua Larosa, ‘Augustus patron of tradition: How Augustus utilised the mos maiorum in the image of the founders of Rome and the ethos they propagated’ (supervising with Dr Hannah Cornwell)

Tim Morrison, ‘A study of Cicero’s De senectute’ (supervising with Dr Elena Theodorakopoulos)

Erich Pracht, as part of the Epistolary Visions of Transformational Leadership research project (supervising with Professor Eve-Marie Becker, University of Münster, Germany)

Find out more - our PhD Classics and Ancient History  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

I specialise in the political life and oratorical culture of the Roman republic and early Empire, especially the history of the late Roman republic, patterns of political careers, all aspects of Cicero, oratory and rhetoric, fragmentary evidence, exempla and cultural memory.

My first book, Cicero’s Role Models, explores Cicero’s rhetorical and political strategy as a newcomer in Roman republican politics. It argues that Cicero advertised himself as follower of chosen models of behaviour from the past – his role models or exempla – in order to promote his public persona and political influence.

My second book, Oratory and Political Career in the Late Roman Republic, investigates the relationship between oratory and political career in the Roman republic. Through close study of speech fragments and testimonies, I analyse how far the oratorical profile and performances of politicians such as Pompey, Caesar, Cato the Younger and others define and restrict their political actions and agendas, and, ultimately, their political influence and careers. In relation to this project, I co-organised an international conference on Oratory and Political Career in the Roman Republic (Oxford, 2010) from which an edited volume appeared: C. Steel & H. van der Blom (eds) (2013), Community and Communication: Oratory and Politics in Republican Rome, Oxford University Press.

I am planning a new book on the reception of Roman republican orators and oratory in the Roman imperial period.

I am the founding director of the Network for Oratory and Politics (NOP), an interdisciplinary research network on the relationship between oratory and politics. The aim of the Network for Oratory and Politics is to facilitate research into and discussion of political oratory across historical periods and regions in order to broaden up the study of political speech and reach out to non-academic communities. It does so by connecting academics with political practitioners of public speech such as politicians, speech writers and the general public in an exchange of knowledge and ideas. The Network has received funding from The Royal Society of Edinburgh and the AHRC. For more information, visit the website for Network for Oratory and Politics. 

Another research project, funded by the AHRC (2017-19) and entitled The Crisis of Rhetoric, has taken the ideas of the Network for Oratory and Politics further: I led a project group of political scientists, linguists, historians, classicists and rhetoricians to analyse what is going wrong in current British political communication. We involved politicians, speech writers, civil servants and political journalists in our research to remedy the faulty communication. 

I am co-investigator on an international and interdisciplinary research project into the leadership through letters by Cicero, St Paul and Seneca, funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark, entitled Epistolary Visions of Transformational Leadership and running 2018-21.

Together with Professor Harvey Yunis, I co-edit the first volume of a new Cambridge History of Rhetoric (5 vols, edited by P. Mack and R. Copeland) which focuses on the ancient world from the third millennium BC to AD 350.

I am a member of the editorial and advisory boards of the Fragments of the Roman Republican Orators project (University of Glasgow) which will provide a new edition with commentary and translation of the fragments of the non-Ciceronian Roman orators of the republican period. Alongside this edition, I co-edited with Professor Catherine Steel and Dr Christa Grey a conference volume entitled Institutions and Ideology in Republican Rome: speech, audience and decision (Cambridge University Press, 2018). For more information, visit the website for the Fragments of the Roman Republican Orators.

• Editorial board member Historia: Zeitschrift für alte Geschichte and Historia Einzelschriften
• Editorial board member Journal of Roman Studies
• Editorial board member Liverpool Studies in Ancient History

Major grants

• 5,900,673 DKK ~ ca. £700,000 (Independent Research Fund Denmark): project ‘Epistolary Visions of Transformational Leadership (EVTL): Cicero - Paul – Seneca’ (Co-PI), 2018-21.
• £34,444 (Arts and Humanities Research Council): project ‘The Crisis of Rhetoric’ (PI), 2017-19.
• £19,929 (Royal Society of Edinburgh): Network for Oratory and Politics (PI), 2015-17.
• £125,000 (Carlsberg Foundation, Denmark): A New Brutus. Oratory and Political Career in the Roman Republic (PI), 2008-12.
•  £14,400 (John Fell OUP Fund, the Pelham Fund at the University of Oxford, the Strategic Research Fund at University of Glasgow and the Carlsberg Foundation, Denmark): international conference Oratory and Politics in the Roman Republic (PI), 2010.

Recorded events

• 'The State of Speech: Cicero and current research into Roman republican oratory', New Year Lecture for the Birmingham and Midlands Branch of the Classical Association, University of Birmingham, 19 January 2017.