UCD School of Classics

My main research areas are warfare, seafaring and society in Classical Antiquity. I have published a book on Piracy in the Graeco-Roman World (Cambridge 1999; Polish translation 2008), plus many articles and chapters on aspects of ancient piracy. I am also contributing articles on "Menschenraub" and "Piraterie" to the online Handwörterbuch der antiken Sklaverei, ed. H. Heinen. My book Seafaring and Civilization: Maritime Perspectives on World History was published by Profile Books in 2001, with German editions in 2003 & 2006.

I am currently completing on a monograph on Ancient Naval Warfare for Routledge. I was awarded a Senior Research Fellowship by the Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences for the academic year 2008-09 to work on this project. It will be the first major work on the subject since 1937. I have presented papers on this research at seminars and conferences in Ireland, the UK, Denmark, Germany, Poland, Spain and the USA. I have published articles and chapters on various aspects of Greek and Roman warfare including chapters on Hellenistic and Roman Republican navies, naval warfare and sieges in the Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare, edited by P. Sabin, H. van Wees & M. Whitby (Cambridge 2007), and a chapter on war at sea for the Oxford Handbook of Classical Warfare, edited by Brian Campbell and Lawrence Tritle (New York and Oxford 2013).

I am editing, with Professors Robert Hohlfelder (University of Colorado, Boulder) and Boris Rankov (Royal Holloway, University of London) The Oxford Handbook of Seafaring in the Classical World, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2014. This multi-authored volume will present the latest research on the subject. A series of international conferences are being organised in conjunction with this project, the first of which is in New York in November 2012.

The next phase of my research and publication on ancient warfare will be a monograph entitled: Warfare in the Ancient World: A Social and Cultural History, to be published by Blackwell. This innovative book will utilize a wide range of textual and material evidence to explore its subject through a number of case studies, ranging in time from Archaic Greece to Late Antiquity. I have published a books on The Peloponnesian War (Oxford, 2002; Spanish translation 2011) and The Greek and Persian Wars (Oxford, 2003). These two works draw on textual and visual evidence to combine overviews of the political and military history with case studies of the social history of Greek warfare. I contributed a chapter on Greek warfare and fortification to the Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World, edited by John P. Oleson (Oxford 2008) and have published several articles and chapters on Roman warfare.

With Professor John France of Swansea University I edited a volume of papers on the subject of  War and Peace in Ancient and Medieval History, Cambridge University Press, 2008. I have also edited an illustrated volume of essays by leading historians and archaeologists on The Ancient World at War, Thames & Hudson, 2008, which has been translated into German, Italian and Spanish.

I am a member of the UCD Centre for War Studies and the UCD Humanities Institute.

Dr Alan Peatfield, School of Archaeology
 
Dr John B. Howard, UCD Librarian

Professor Robert Hohlfelder, Department of History, University of Colorado, Boulder

Professor Boris Rankov, Department of Classics, Royal Holloway University of London