Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis

  • University of Oxford and King's College London
  • Lecturer in Classical Art and Archaeology, Corpus Christi College, Oxford; Lecturer in Classical Greek Art, King's College London

Dr Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis grew up in Greece and read Classics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford (BA 1995). She went on to study Art History (Byzantine and Classical) at The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London (MA 1996 and PhD 2001, funded by a scholarship from the University of London). She began her career teaching at University College Dublin (2001–2002), followed by a Special Leverhulme Research Fellowship at the University of Nottingham (2002-2005), where she had deferred a permanent lectureship. Between 2005 and 2012 she took a career break to bring up her three children. During this time she worked part time as a Lecturer in Classical Art and Archaeology at Corpus Christi College, Oxford (2005–2017). From 2012–2016 she held a Lectureship in Classical Greek Art at King’s College London in addition to her position at Corpus Christi College. In 2017 she resumed full time work and joined the School of Classics at St Andrews.

She is a cultural historian working on Classical material culture in the ancient Greek world, and on its reception in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is particularly interested in searching out marginalised, non-elite voices, and in exploring intimate, small scale encounters with objects within the natural or built landscape. There are two main strands in her research: first, religion, travel and the body in the Greek world of the Hellenistic and Roman periods and, second, the reception of Classical material culture, especially ceramics, in Europe c.1760-1830.