Professor Lynette Mitchell
Associate Professor in Greek History and Politics
Extension: 4203
Telephone: 01392 724203
I took my first degree at the University of New England, Armidale in northern New South Wales. I came to the UK in 1991 after being awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship to undertake a PhD at Durham University with Professor Peter Rhodes. I subsequently held a British Academy Post-doctoral Fellowship and Junior Research Fellowship at Oriel College, Oxford, before coming to Exeter in 1998.
I am primarily a Greek historian who works on Greek political history and Greek contacts with the non-Greek world in the period from the archaic period (8th century BC) to the death of Alexander. I am also interested both in later periods (especially the Hellenistic), and in other areas of Classics & Ancient History, especially Greek language and historiography. My current area of interest is the development of Greek political theory, especially in relation to Greek democratic theorising, and its conceptual and theoretical relationship to ideas about monarchy.
My first book, Greeks Bearing Gifts (published by CUP in 1997), was a revised version of my PhD thesis on the political significance of friendships for interstate relationships in the fifth and fourth centuries. I have also just completed a monograph (Panhellenism and the Barbarian in Archaic and Classical Greece, published by the Classical Press of Wales in 2007), which tries to define the phenomenon of Panhellenism, and so considers issues of identity and the relationship between Greeks and non-Greeks (and especially those of Asia) in this period, as well as considering the ways in which it changed and developed over time.
I can offer supervision on topics in Greek political history from the archaic to the early Hellenistic periods, Greek contacts with the non-Greek world, and the development of Greek political thought.
I have also organised a number of conferences. The most recent was a conference on kingship in the Near East and medieval Europe with Professor Charles Melville of Cambridge (22-24 Septermber, 2008). I have also organised a conference on the Greek island of Rhodes held in 2005 to mark Peter Rhodes' 65th birthday ('Rhodes on Rhodes'). The papers from this conference have been published by the Classical Press of Wales as Greek History and Epigraphy. The proceedings of a conference organised jointly with Peter Rhodes at Durham in 1994, The Development of the Polis in Archaic Greece, have been published by Routledge in 1997. I also organised a conference on 'Money and culture in archaic Greece' with Professor Richard Seaford in 1999.
