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Person-Post: Alastair Harden – Fellow

9th July 2008

works at the Beazley Archive, University of Oxford. He is a graduate of Christ Church, Oxford, where he was awarded a first class BA in Classical Archaeology and Ancient History and an MSt in Classical Archaeology. As an undergraduate he received the Fell exhibition at Christ Church, and Oxford University’s Thomas Whitcombe Greene prize for Classical Art and Archaeology. After his BA he spent two years working for pioneering cosmetics company Lush. In 2013 he obtained a PhD in Classics at the University of Reading for a thesis on the iconography of animal skin garments in Archaic Greek art. While a PhD student he authored the chapter on Animals in Classical Art for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Animals in Classical Thought and Life (ed. Gordon Campbell) and completed the sourcebook Animals in the Classical World: Ethical Perspectives from Greek and Roman Texts for the Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics series, published in 2013. His research interests include depictions of animals and half-animals in literature and art from the prehistoric era to the present day, particularly in regard to ethical responses to animal imagery. He hopes to pursue extensive research on the semantics of animal imagery in Classical art, particularly on animals and the articulation of power in Roman public art; he convened the panel The Art History of the Animal for the Association of Art Historians conference in April 2013. He was a founding member of the Oxford University Animal Ethics Society, and has taught at the Universities of Oxford, Reading and Winchester.