Dr Penelope Goodman

Profile

I completed my first degree in Ancient History at the University of Bristol (1994-7), before moving to Christ Church, Oxford for my M.St. and D.Phil. (1997-2001). After finishing my post-graduate studies, I taught at the universities of Oxford, Warwick and Reading and Queen's University Belfast. I joined Classics at Leeds in September 2006.

Responsibilities

• Director of Research and Innovation for LCS

Research interests

There are two main strands to my research. One is concerned with the relationship between the spatial organisation of Roman settlements and the needs and priorities of the communities which built them. This interest sprang from my D.Phil. thesis, which looked at the use of space on the edges of Roman cities, and is now available as a Routledge monograph entitled The Roman City and its Periphery: from Rome to Gaul. Since publishing this monograph I have continued to work on the organisation of built environments in the Roman world, including the spatial distribution of temples and workshops and the definition and significance of urban boundaries.

My other research area is the reception of the emperor Augustus from his death up to the present day. This relates especially to the bimillennial anniversaries of his birth on 23 September 1938 and death on 19 August 2014. The bimillennium of Augustus’ death represented two thousand years of Augustus himself being gone, and other people using, appropriating and reinventing his image to serve their own needs and interests, and I held a major international conference on this theme in Leeds over the date of the anniversary, now published as Afterlives of Augustus: AD 14 - 2014 (Cambridge University Press). I have since been awarded a Leverhulme research fellowship for a project on the events and activities held to mark the bimillennium of his birth in 1938, especially outside Italy. This research examines how Italians encouraged the commemoration of Augustus outside Italy as a means of pursuing soft power, while non-Italians were also eager to participate in the anniversary for reasons which included articulating a shared cultural heritage, seeking to prevent war by appealing to Augustus as an icon of peace, justifying their own imperialism, boosting public interest in antiquity or furthering their own forms of right-wing authoritarianism.

Publications

• Forthcoming: With Christopher P Dickenson: 'Zoning the city' in Maarten Prak. Penelope J E Davies and Christina G Williamson, eds. The Cambridge Urban History of Europe, Volume I: The Ancient World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. c. 8000 words.
• 2024: 'Retrospective Parentage: Augustus as a Father of Europe' in C. Davenport and S. Malik, eds. Representing Rome’s Emperors: Historical and Cultural Perspectives through Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 265-95.
• 2023: ’Augustus and his bimillennium in the soft power strategy of the Fascist regime’, in F. Oppedisano, P.S. Salvatori and F. Santangelo, eds., Costruire la nuova Italia: miti di Roma e fascismo (Rome: Viella): 285-310.
• 2020: ‘In omnibus regionibus? The fourteen regions and the city of Rome’, in Papers of the British School at Rome 88: 1-32.
• 2018: 'Defining the city: the boundaries of Rome', in C. Holleran and A. Claridge, eds., A Companion to the City of Rome (Oxford: Blackwell): 71-91.
• 2018: 'Twelve Augusti' in The Journal of Roman Studies 108: 156-70.
• 2018: Afterlives of Augustus: AD 14 - 2014 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
• 2017: ‘Bridging the gap: teaching and studying Ancient History and Classical Civilisation from school to university’, in Journal of Classics Teaching 18: 48-53. (Available online)
• 2016: With M. Lindner: ‘Schurke und Idealherrscher – Augustus und das Kaiserbild des Antikfilms’ in E. Baltrusch et al., ed. Der Erste. Augustus und der Beginn einer neuen Epoche (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft): 147-57.
• 2016: 'Working together: clusters of artisans in the Roman city' in A. Wilson and M. Flohr, eds. Urban Craftsmen and Traders in the Roman World (Oxford: OUP): 301-333.
• 2016: ‘The urban peripheries’ in A. Cooley, ed. A Companion to Roman Italy (Oxford: Blackwell): 308-329.
• 2013: With S. Green, Animating Antiquity: Harryhausen and the Classical tradition (Open University). (Available online)
• 2013: 'The production centres: settlement hierarchies and spatial distribution' in M. Fulford and E. Durham, eds. Seeing Red: new economic and social perspectives on terra sigillata (London: Institute of Classical Studies): 121-136.
• 2013: 'Temple architecture and urban boundaries in Gaul and Britain: two worlds or one?', in T. Kaizer, A. Leone, E. Thomas and R. Witcher (eds.), Cities and Gods (Leiden: Stichting Babesch): 81-96.
• 2012: '‘I am master of nothing’: Imperium: Augustus and the story of Augustus on screen' in New Voices in Classical Reception Studies 7: 13-24. (Available online)
• 2011: 'Temples in late antique Gaul' in L. Lavan and M. Mulryan, eds. The Archaeology of Late Antique Paganism (Leiden: Brill): 165-193.
• 2007: The Roman City and its Periphery: from Rome to Gaul (London: Routledge).
• 2002: 'The provincial sanctuaries of the imperial cult at Lyon and Narbonne: examples of urban exclusion or social inclusion?', in Proceedings of the Symposium On Mediterranean Archaeology 2001, Liverpool (Oxford: BAR Int. Series 1040): 91-104.

Student education

I welcome applications from prospective PhD candidates interested in all aspects of Roman history; particularly Roman urbanism and Roman politics.

I am currently supervising the following PhD projects:

• Roman exile literature: an ecocritical approach

I have also supervised the following completed PhD projects:

• Amphitheatres and cultural change in Roman Britain
• How were representations of 'Prisoners of War' used by Rome's elite in the 1st century BCE, and what does this tell us about Roman culture?
• The role of Aquileia in the process of creating contacts and developing cultural interactions between Rome and the regions of Noricum (181 BC - AD 235)
• Mapping the Inhabited Urban Built Environment: The socio-spatial significance of the material presence of boundaries through time
• The Roman Eagle: A symbol and its evolution
• The Durius Valley: Local Identity, Culture Change, and Landscape Relationships in Roman Spain and Portugal

Research groups and institutes

• History
• Classics

Current postgraduate researchers

• Elinor Cosgrave
• Karen Fox