Biography
Thomas completed his PhD in Classics at Trinity College, Cambridge. His thesis investigated the 'Alexandrian footnote' and other markers of intertextuality in archaic Greek literature, arguing that the earliest known Greek poets self-consciously acknowledged the familiarity of their subject matter and signalled their references to tradition – placing markers in their works for alert audiences to recognise. This kind of signposting is often considered the preserve of later literary cultures, closely linked with the development of libraries, literacy and writing. But the thesis demonstrated that these same devices were already deeply engrained in our earliest oral archaic Greek poetry.
Before moving to Cambridge, Thomas completed his Undergraduate (2013) and Master's (2014) degrees at the University of Oxford. After his PhD, he took up a Research Fellowship in Classics at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (2018-2021).
During his PhD, he co-organised a conference on Hellenistic Poetry Beyond Callimachean Aesthetics, 1-3 September 2016 (http://www.castingoffshadows2016.co.uk/), and was also a member of the organising committee for the AHRC DTP's Conference on Time and Temporality, 14-16 September 2016.
He is very open to any kind of collaborative research and happy to be contacted about any ideas for collaboration, however preliminary.
Research Interests:
- Intertextuality and Allusion
- Citation and Quotation
- (Meta-)poetics
- Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic Greek Literature, esp. Poetry
- Hellenistic Royal Ideologies
- Interrelation of Image and Text
- Roman Reception of Greek, esp. Hellenistic, Literature.
Publications and Teaching:
For information on my teaching and research (including a full list of publications and talks), please see my personal website and academia.edu page.
