Dr Guy Westwood

I read Classics at Balliol College and stayed in Oxford for my graduate work (MSt and DPhil, both at Merton College), holding two temporary college lectureships (at Jesus and Magdalen) during that time. I then held the Leventis Research Fellowship in Ancient Greek at Merton (2013-17) before moving to the University of Birmingham for a year as Teaching Fellow in Classical Greek History and Language. I returned to Oxford in 2018 to St Hugh’s College and to the first of a series of Departmental Lectureship posts, the second of which brought me to LMH in 2019. I took up my current post as Fellow and Tutor in Classics here in 2023, along with an Associate Professorship in Greek Language and Literature in the Classics Faculty.

My research focuses on classical Greek and Roman rhetorical prose literature, especially the surviving political oratory of democratic Athens. My first book, The Rhetoric of the Past in Demosthenes and Aeschines: Oratory, History, and Politics in Classical Athens (Oxford: OUP, 2020) looked at how these two prominent fourth-century Athenian politicians deployed examples from, and ideas about, Athens’s past to persuade mass citizen audiences in the city’s lawcourts and political Assembly. I continue to work on Demosthenes and Aeschines in particular, and I am also increasingly looking at classical Athenian oratory’s performance aspects and its relationships with drama, especially comedy. Most types of development in the study of fifth and fourth-century Greece tend to interest me, though, and I enjoy trying to keep abreast of advances in research (including archaeological research) on states and communities beyond Athens, especially elsewhere in central Greece and in the Peloponnese.

I organize undergraduate Classics (Literae Humaniores) at LMH – in particular its language and literature elements – as well as the classical sides of the joint schools. I mainly teach ancient Greek language and literature, and some Greek history, though I also enjoy teaching Latin language and literature from time to time, especially areas and authors where I have a special interest (e.g. oratory and historiography). Particularly rewarding to teach are those papers which require a combination of literary and historical approaches, as my research does – and that means, above all, the Greek special subjects in Classics Mods and CAAH Prelims (focused on Aristophanes and Thucydides). In my Faculty role, I teach and supervise graduate students on the MSt, MPhil, and DPhil courses, and give university lectures on a variety of topics (mainly Greek).

(2023) ‘Imagining Justice in the Athenian Lawcourt: Aeschines and Others’, in E. Clifford and X. Buxton (eds.), The Imagination of the Mind in Classical Athens: Forms of Thought, London (Routledge): 151-72.

(2022) ‘Changing the Sail: Propertius 3.21, Catullus 64 and Ovid Heroides 5’, Classical Quarterly 72: 247-54.

(2021) ‘Audience Memory as Evidence in the Trial on the Crown’, in A. Markantonatos, V. Liotsakis, and A. Serafim (eds.), Witnesses and Evidence in Ancient Greek Literature, Berlin (De Gruyter): 59-79.

(2020) The Rhetoric of the Past in Demosthenes and Aeschines: Oratory, History, and Politics in Classical Athens (Oxford: OUP).

(2019) ‘Aristotle’s Demosthenes, the Killing of Nicanor, and the Composition of the Rhetoric’, Classical Philology 114: 645-56.

(2019) ‘Views on the Past’, in G. Martin (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Demosthenes, Oxford: 179-90.

(2018) ‘Philocrates and the Orgas’, Hermes 146: 349-57.

(2017) ‘Demosthenes and the Islands: On Organization 34’, Mnemosyne 70: 501-11.

(2017) ‘The Orator and the Ghosts: Performing the Past in Fourth-Century Athens’, in S. Papaioannou, A. Serafim, and B. da Vela (eds.), The Theatre of Justice: Aspects of Performance in Greco-Roman Oratory and Rhetoric, Leiden: 57-74.

(2017) ‘Livia’s Shadow: A Subtext in Tacitus, Annals 1.10.5?’, Eranos 108 (2014/15): 53-61.

(2017) ‘Plutarch’s Aesion: A Note on Plutarch, Demosthenes 11.4’, Mnemosyne 70: 316-24.

(2016) ‘Nostalgia, Politics, and Persuasion in Demosthenes’ Letters’, in E. Sanders and M. Johncock (eds.), Emotion and Persuasion in Classical Antiquity, Stuttgart: 75-90.