Fiona McHardy

I am Head of Learning and Teaching in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. 

I came to Roehampton in 2003 as the first lecturer in Classics and was responsible for building up the BA Classical Civilisation programme in its early days. I became Programme Convener for BA Classical Civilisation in 2005 and Head of Classics in 2017, then Head of Classics and History in 2020, before taking up my current role in 2022.

BA Honours Ancient and Modern Greek

MA Ancient Drama and Society

PhD on The Ideology of Revenge in Ancient Greek Culture

I am interested in ancient and modern Greek literature, folk poetry, anthropology and culture. My focus to date has been on revenge ethics, especially in Homeric epic, Greek tragedy and Attic oratory. I have a particular interest in representations of gender and revenge in ancient and modern Greek literature. Currently I am working on gendered violence in ancient Greek myth and literature with a particular focus on infanticide, domestic violence and uxoricide.  I have a long-standing research interest in Greek tragic fragments and am currently researching how violent and vengeful acts were portrayed in tragedies that are no longer extant. I am also editing A Cultural History of Violence in Antiquity for Bloomsbury.

I am currently working on a monograph about gender and violence in ancient Greece for Bloomsbury. I have co-edited a number of volumes including most recently Revenge and Gender in Classical, Medieval and Early Modern Literature with Lesel Dawson from the University of Bristol. With Mark Masterson I am series editor for Intersectionality in Antiquty for Edinburgh University Press, and with Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz I am co-editor of a series on Classical Pedagogy in the 21st Century for Routledge. For this series I am co-editing a volume on Diversity and the Study of Antiquity in Higher Education with Daniel Libatique.

Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Fellow of SEDA

Member of the Classical Association of England and Wales

Member of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies

Member of the Society for Classical Studies (N.America)

Member of the Women's Classical Caucus 

I teach the following modules:

- Homer and the Epic Cycle

- Violence and Law in Ancient Greece

- Athens

- Classical Greek Tragedy

- Dissertation

I am currently supervising PhD theses on the following topics:

- A Study of Combat Trauma in 5th and Early 4th Century Greece

- Intersectional Approaches to Classical Mythology

- The Female Trickster in Greek Mythology

I have previously supervised PhD students working on:

- Animal Metaphors and the Depiction of Female Avengers in Attic Tragedy 

- Greek and Poetic Identity in the Works of C. P. Cavafy

- Paraphilias in Ancient Greece

- The idea of 'beautiful death' in Euripidean tragedy

- Nature imagery connected to rituals of birth, initiation, marriage and death in Apollonius Rhodius.

- The depiction of sexual violence against women in Attic oratory