Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Staff are responsible for graduate coursework admissions and can help you choose subjects to constitute a major in these areas of study. For details of available courses and areas of study please see the Undergraduate and Graduate coursework web pages.

Jaynie Anderson (Culture and Communication)
Art history in the early modern period from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, with a special interest in the Renaissance in Venice. The history of conservation, patronage and twentieth-century Australian art.
Find an Expert profile
Email:jaynie@unimelb.edu.au

Kim On Chong-Gossard (Historical and Philosophical Studies)
Greek tragedy, specifically the gendered use of language in Euripides. Other interests include gender theory, Senecan drama, Roman prosopography and Latin pedagogy.
Find an Expert profile
Email: koc@unimelb.edu.au

Justin Clemens (Culture and Communication)
Primary interest: psychoanalysis.  Recent books include Limericks, Philosophical and Literary (Surpllus 2019), and the edited collections What is Education? (Edinburgh University Press 2017) with A.J. Bartlett, and The Afterlives of Georges Perec (Edinburgh University Press 2017) with Rowan Wilken.  In addition to his scholarly work, he is well-known nationally as a commentator on Australian art and literature, and his essays and reviews have appeared in The Age, The Australian, The Monthly, Meanjin, Overland, Arena Magazine, TEXT, Un Magazine, Discipline, The Sydney Review of Books, and many others.  With Thomas H. Ford, he is currently working on a monograph about the colonial judge Barron Field. 
Find an Expert profile
Email: jclemens@unimelb.edu.au

Brent Davis (Historical and Philosophical Studies)
Ancient Egyptian, Bronze Age Aegean and Philistine archaeology and art; languages and scripts of the ancient eastern Mediterranean, especially Egyptian hieroglyphs and the pre-alphabetic scripts of the Aegean and Cyprus; ancient Egyptian literature.
Find an Expert profile
Email: bedavis@unimelb.edu.au

Véronique Duché (Languages and Linguistics)
Sixteenth-century French literature, in particular fictional works published between 1525 and 1557; chivalry novels; theoretical problems and issues concerning genre (Middle Ages and Renaissance); translation into French.
Find an Expert profile
Email: veronique.duche@ unimelb.edu.au

Anne Dunlop (Culture and Communication)
Art and culture of medieval and early-modern Italy and Europe; links between Italy and Asia in time of the Mongol Empire; early secular art.
Find an Expert profile
Email: anne.dunlop@unimelb.edu.au

Mark Erdmann (Culture and Communication)
Mark Erdmann is a Lecturer in Art History.  Mark specializes in Japanese pre-modern architecture, particularly of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, and the intersection of space, painting, carpentry, and power.  His research focuses on castles, warrior elite residences, palaces, as well as the Jesuit mission in Japan and their impact on visual culture.
Find an Expert profile
Email: merdmann@unimelb.edu.au

Russell Goulbourne (Languages and Linguistics)
Primary interest: literature in French.
Find an Expert profile
Russell is the Dean of the Faculty of Arts.  He has published and taught extensively on major figures in French intellectual culture of the 17th and 18th centuries, including Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau.  His research interests include the history of the book and textual editing and reception of Classical Antiquity in Early Modern France. 
Email: russell.goulbourne@unimelb.edu.au

Louise Hitchcock (Historical and Philosophical Studies)
Aegean Bronze Age archaeology and architecture (Minoan Crete, Mycenaean Greece and the Cyclades). Archaeological theory: especially contextual and spatial analysis, structuration and agency, complex society, gender, critical theory, cultural diversity, landscape, ethnicity, the politics of the past, ethics and the transmission of culture. Cypriot archaeology. Israelite and Philistine architecture.
Find an Expert profile
Email: lahi@unimelb.edu.au

Andrew Jamieson (Historical and Philosophical Studies)
Archaeology of the ancient Near East and Egypt, the conservation and interpretation of archaeological sites, ethno-archaeological research, high temperature industries and the study of ceramics.
Find an Expert profile
Email: asj@unimelb.edu.au

Hyun Jin Kim (Historical and Philosophical Studies)
Greek history (Herodotus); Greek ethnography; Greeks and Barbarians; Romans and Barbarians in Late Antiquity; Comparative history (Greece and China).
Find an Expert profile
Email: kim.h@unimelb.edu.au

Stephen Knight (Culture and Communication)
Professorial Fellow. Areas of expertise include English literature, Medieval literature, cultural studies, crime fiction, King Arthur, Robin Hood and Australian matters.
Find an Expert profile
Email: stephen.knight@unimelb.edu.au

Stephen Kolsky (Language and Linguistics)
Medieval and Renaissance studies, with a particular interest in Renaissance theories of behaviour, especially Castiglione and Della Casa; theories of gender in the early modern period; the culture of the northern Italian courts in the 15th and 16th centuries; 20th-century Italian literature, especially drama and narrative.
Find an Expert profile
Email: sdkolsky@unimelb.edu.au

Catherine Kovesi (Historical and Philosophical Studies)
Research interest in luxury and consumption in Renaissance Italy; Florentine family and political life; the Tuscan contado.
Find an Expert profile
Email: c.kovesi@unimelb.edu.au

Miles Lewis (Architecture)
Mediterranean and European architecture and building from the pre-classical to the eighteenth century.
Find an Expert profile
Email: milesbl@unimelb.edu.au

Elizabeth Malcolm (Historical and Philosophical Studies)
Late medieval and early modern Ireland: war, crime and violence; women; medicine and disease; drink.
Find an Expert profile
Email: e.malcolm@unimelb.edu.au

Chris Marshall (Culture and Communication)
Renaissance, Baroque and contemporary art; art curatorship, collecting and the art market; and the history and philosophy of museums.
Find an Expert profile
Email: crmars@unimelb.edu.au

Matthew Martin (Culture and Communication)
Matthew's research interests include: Eighteenth-century European Decorative arts; the historiography of the decorative arts and their display in museums; the cultural aesthetics of eighteenth-century European porcelain and the medium's connections to the European alchemical tradition; the Early Modern domestic interior; Chinoiserie and Japonisme; collecting and patronage amongst seventeenth and eighteenth-century recusant elites; Jacobite material culture. 
Find an Expert profile
Email: mmartin1@unimelb.edu.au

Una McIlvenna (Historical and Philosophical Studies)
Early modern European cultural and literary history; news-balladry, especially execution ballads (English, French, German, Italian); history of crime and punishment, particularly public execution; court studies; history of emotions; verse and song libel culture.
Find an Expert profile
Email: una.mcilvenna@unimelb.edu.au

David McInnis (Culture and Communication)
Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama.
Find an Expert profile
Email: mcinnisd@unimelb.edu.au

Peter McPhee (Historical and Philosophical Studies)
Primary interest: history of modern France.  Peter has published widely on the history of modern France, notably A Social History of France 1780-1880 (London, 1992), Revolution and Environment in Southern France, 1780-1830 (Oxford, 1999), Living The French Revolution 1789-1799 (Basingstoke, 2006), and Robespierre: a Revolutionary Life (2012).  In 1999 he published a biography of the former Chancellor Roy Douglas ('Pansy') Wright.  His most recent book is Liberty or Death: The French Revolution (2016).
Find an Expert profile
Email: p.mcphee@unimelb.edu.au

Peter Otto (Culture and Communication)
Romanticism; Romanticism and contemporary culture; Gothic fictions; William Blake; virtual reality; literary/cultural theory; multimedia.
Find an Expert profile
Email: peterjo@unimelb.edu.au

Ron Ridley (Historical and Philosophical Studies)
History of the preclassical and classical world (especially Egypt and Rome); history of archaeology (especially Egypt and Rome); history of historical writing.
Find an Expert profile
Email: r.ridley@unimelb.edu.au

Andrea Rizzi (Languages and Linguistics, Italian Studies)
Political implications of translation in the Italian and European Renaissance and the role played by the early modern translator in the successful communication of political propaganda. Translation history, Humanism and the northern courts of fifteenth-century Italy (Milan, Ferrara, Venice, Mantua and Rimini).
Find an Expert profile
Email: arizzi@unimelb.edu.au

Jenny Spinks (Historical and Philosophical Studies)
Religious identity and printing/book cultures in early modern Germany, France and the Low Countries. The history of polemical print, wonders and disasters, the supernatural and European encounters with non-European religious rituals in the sixteenth century.
Find an Expert profile
Email: jspinks@unimelb.edu.au

Stephanie Trigg (Culture and Communication)
Chaucer; fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English literature; medievalism.
Find an Expert profile
Email: sjtrigg@unimelb.edu.au

Clara Tuite (Culture and Communication)
Romanticism; eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and cultural history; history of sexualities; Regency public culture; historical fiction; the literary institution; nineteenth-century aestheticism; literary hedonisms.
Find an Expert profile
Email: clarat@unimelb.edu.au

Frederik Vervaet (Historical and Philosophical Studies)
Roman history; political and institutional history of the Republic and the Early Empire; Roman public law; prosopography of the Senate.
Find an Expert profile
Email: fvervaet@unimelb.edu.au

Gerhard Wiesenfeldt (Historical and Philosophical Studies)
Primary interest: Early Modern empiricism.  1995-1998 Research Associate at the Institute for the History of Science, Mathematics and Engineering, University of Hamburg; 1999-2001 Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in the independent junior research group "Experimental History of Science" under the direction of H. Otto Sibum; 2000-2003 Secretary of the German Society for the History of Medicine, Science and Technology. 
Find an Expert profile
Email: gerhardw@unimelb.edu.au

Charles Zika (Historical and Philosophical Studies)
Late medieval and early modern Europe, especially the societies of northern Europe and German-speaking regions: emotions, sacred space and pilgrimage; emotions of rejection/exclusion and religious community; responses to disaster; the European witch-hunt and images of witchcraft; visual images, power and propaganda.
Find an Expert profile
Email: c.zika@unimelb.edu.au