Webinar - After the Plague: Insights from Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern History

Professor Alastair Blanshard

Paul Eliadis Chair of Classics and Ancient History, The University of Queensland

Alastair is currently serving as director of the program in Western Civilisation at UQ. He has held positions at Merton College, Oxford, the University of Reading, and the University of Sydney. He has been a visiting fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, the University of Cincinnati, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and the University of Warwick.

His research examines the way the ancient world impacts on the modern. His first book on the West’s fascination with the figure of Hercules has been translated into four languages. He has written on topics as diverse as the myth of the ancient orgy, the impact of Greek statuary on the sport of bodybuilding, and 18th-century travel writing about Greece. One of his abiding interests is the way in which ancient political ideals remain relevant to today’s debates.

Senior Lecturer in Greek History and Language, School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, The University of Queensland

Dr Brown teaches and researches in the Classics and Ancient History discipline at UQ. Her interests span Archaic to Byzantine Greek History, Archaeology and Art History. She is writing a book on cults of ancient Greek seafarers, and just completed a DECRA fellowship from the Australian Research Council. Her monograph Corinth in Late Antiquity: A Greek, Roman & Christian City was published by IB Tauris in 2018, and is now a Bloomsbury paperback. She received her PhD in 2008 from the University of California at Berkeley in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology. Her 1999 AB with High Honours was received in History, Hellenic Studies and Visual Arts from Princeton University, where she also held the postdoctoral Hannah Seeger Davis Fellowship in Hellenic Studies in 2009. She has published numerous articles on Ancient Greece, particularly in the era of Late Antiquity, and is an expert on ancient to medieval Corinth, Thessalonike and Malta. She is president of the Australasian Association for Byzantine Studies, and with Bronwen Neil co-editor of Byzantine Culture in Translation, ByzAus 21 (Leiden: Brill, 2017).

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, The University of Queensland.

Dr Spacey is a historian of medieval religious cultures specialising in the crusades and with broader interests in the European and Eastern Mediterranean world of the central Middle Ages, especially the miraculous and supernatural, heresy and religious persecution, and gender. Her first book, The Miraculous and the Writing of Crusade Narrative, was published with Boydell & Brewer in 2020.

Dr Karin Sellberg 

Lecturer, School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, The University of Queensland 

Dr Sellberg is a lecturer in humanities based in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at UQ. She completed her PhD in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh in 2010, and she specialises on medical history, medical humanities and convergences between early modern medicine, embodiment and literature.