Professor Barbara Borg
Professor, Head of Classics and Ancient History
Extension: 4219
Telephone: 01392 724219
Professor Barbara Borg
The field I study and teach is Classical Archaeology, i.e. the study of 'art' and archaeology of the Greeks and Romans.
I contribute to the understanding of the so-called Classical civilisations and their spheres of influence by focussing on visual and material culture as a source of information, thus supplementing the predominantly text-based disciplines of Ancient History and Classics. I take advantage of the fact that visual and material culture not only expresses the same things as texts in a different media, but that it is a source of its own, for the understanding of fields of life and groups in society not covered by texts, or treated by their authors in a very idiosyncratic way. So my teaching aims at providing the skills and techniques necessary to exploit these sources for anthropological and social history, and covers a broad range of subjects from archaic Greece to the later Roman Empire.
In my research, I focus on four major fields: (1) The language and 'rhetoric' of images and the relationship between image and text; (2) Inter-cultural relationships, in particular the multi-cultural society of Roman Egypt; (3) Roman portraiture as a major source of information about the self-image and value-system of the inhabitants of the Roman Empire; (4) Geo-archaeology, in particular the study of the provenance of marble, contributing to an understanding of ancient economies.
Among my publications, there are many German ones, but the following English publications may give an idea of my work and scholarly approach:
B.E. Borg (ed.), Paideia: The World of the Second Sophistic (Berlin 2004); my contribution "Glamorous intellectuals: Portraits of pepaideumenoi in the second and third centuries AD" pp. 157-178.
Eunomia or "Make Love not War"? in: E.J. Stafford - J. Herrin (edd.), Personification in the Greek World (Berlin 2004) 157-78.
'The History of Apollo's Temple at Didyma, as told by Marble Analyses and Historical Sources', in: L. Lazzarini (ed.), Interdisciplinary studies on ancient stone. ASMOSIA VI; proceedings of the sixth international conference of the Association for the Study of Marble and Other Stones in Antiquity, Venice, June 15-18 2000 (Venice 2003) 271-78 (with G. Borg).
The Face of the Elite, - Arion 8.1, 2000, 63-96.
