Daisy Dunn | |
---|---|
Born | London |
Occupation | Author, classicist |
Language | English |
Nationality | British |
Education | Ibstock Place School, The Lady Eleanor Holles School |
Alma mater | University of Oxford |
Years active | 2016- |
Daisy Florence Dunn is an English author and classicist.
Daisy Dunn was born in London and attended Ibstock Place School in Southwest London and The Lady Eleanor Holles School in Hampton on an academic scholarship. [1] She graduated in Classics from St Hilda's College, Oxford in 2009, and won a scholarship to study for an MA in the History of Art at the Courtauld Institute, London, specialising in Titian, Venice and Renaissance Europe. [2] [3] She was awarded a PhD from University College London with a thesis exploring ekphrasis in Greek and Latin poetry and sixteenth-century Italian painting. [4] [5] She was long-listed in 2015 for the international Notting Hill Editions Prize for the essay "An Unlikely Friendship". [6]
In 2016 she published her first two books, a biography of the Latin love poet Catullus and a new translation of his poems. [7] [8] The biography, entitled Catullus' Bedspread, received endorsements from Boris Johnson, Robert Harris and Tom Holland and was described as a "superb portrait" in The Sunday Times. [9] Dunn's translation of one of Catullus' expletives resulted in a series of letters in The Times Literary Supplement and an article in The Times . [10] [11] In a 2016 article in The Guardian Simon Schama included Dunn in his list of leading female historians. [12]
Dunn's 2019 dual biography of Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger, In the Shadow of Vesuvius: A Life of Pliny, published as The Shadow of Vesuvius in the US, was a New York Times Editor's Choice, a Waterstones Best History Book of 2019, and a Book of the Year in several publications. Dunn was interviewed ahead of its release by The Sunday Times. [13]
Also in 2019, Dunn published an anthology of ancient stories in English translation, Of Gods and Men: 100 Stories from Ancient Greece and Rome, for which she was interviewed by Paul Ross on TalkRadio. [14] [15] A month later, she released Homer, part of a new "expert" series of Ladybird books.
Dunn is a regular commentator, critic and columnist, writing for The Spectator , The Daily Telegraph and Literary Review , among other publications. She has contributed to BBC Radio 4, the BBC World Service, TalkRadio, BBC.com (Culture) [16] and BBC 2, for which she participated in the 2016 Christmas University Challenge for notable alumni, with her team winning the series. In 2018 and 2019 she presented two short films on Ancient Wisdom for BBC Ideas. [17]
In 2020, Dunn was awarded the Classical Association Prize, [18] which recognises efforts to bring the classics to public attention. [19]
Dunn's sixth book, Not Far From Brideshead: Oxford Between the Wars, a group biography of the classicists Maurice Bowra, E. R. Dodds and Gilbert Murray, was published in March 2022. In The Times, Laura Freeman wrote of Dunn's "gift for making the arcane accessible and the forbidding more friendly" and the book as being "a love letter to learning". [20] It was described by Leo Robson in the New Statesman as "Lucid, agile, juicy, nuanced". [21] It was listed as a book of the year by Waterstones, [22] The Independent, and The Daily Telegraph.
Dunn is the author of:
Gaius Plinius Secundus, called Pliny the Elder, was a Roman author, naturalist, natural philosopher, and naval and army commander of the early Roman Empire, and a friend of the emperor Vespasian. He wrote the encyclopedic Naturalis Historia, which became an editorial model for encyclopedias. He spent most of his spare time studying, writing, and investigating natural and geographic phenomena in the field.
Mount Vesuvius is a somma-stratovolcano located on the Gulf of Naples in Campania, Italy, about 9 km (5.6 mi) east of Naples and a short distance from the shore. It is one of several volcanoes forming the Campanian volcanic arc. Vesuvius consists of a large cone partially encircled by the steep rim of a summit caldera, resulting from the collapse of an earlier, much higher structure.
Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, born Gaius Caecilius or Gaius Caecilius Cilo, better known as Pliny the Younger, was a lawyer, author, and magistrate of Ancient Rome. Pliny's uncle, Pliny the Elder, helped raise and educate him.
Clodia, nicknamed Quadrantaria, Nola, Medea Palatina by Cicero, and occasionally referred to in scholarship as Clodia Metelli, was one of three known daughters of the ancient Roman patrician Appius Claudius Pulcher.
Garum is a fermented fish sauce that was used as a condiment in the cuisines of Phoenicia, ancient Greece, Rome, Carthage and later Byzantium. Liquamen is a similar preparation, and at times they were synonymous. Although garum enjoyed its greatest popularity in the Western Mediterranean and the Roman world, it was earlier used by the Greeks.
Jonathan Saul Freedland is a British journalist who writes a weekly column for the Guardian. He presents BBC Radio 4's contemporary history series The Long View. Freedland also writes thrillers, mainly under the pseudonym Sam Bourne, and has written a play, Jews. In Their Own Words, performed in 2022 at the Royal Court Theatre, London.
Dame Winifred Mary Beard, is an English scholar of Ancient Rome. She is a trustee of the British Museum and formerly held a personal professorship of Classics at the University of Cambridge. She is a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, and Royal Academy of Arts Professor of Ancient Literature.
In Ancient Roman culture, cena or coena was the main meal of the day. The grammarian, Sextus Pompeius Festus, preserved in his De verborum significatione that in earlier times, cena was held midday but later began to be held in evenings, with prandium replacing the noon meal. Cena would occur after work was completed for the day and was a focal point of social life, along with the public baths, the frequenting of which often preceded the meal. Seating during dinner was in the triclinium, three couches for reclining arranged as three sides of a square, with a small table for food in the middle of all these, although masonry dining areas have been found in Pompeian gardens for out of doors dining during warmer weather. Whether inside or out, the couches would have been cushioned by mattresses and pillows while the diners reclined on their elbows. Ancient Romans believed that having more than one meal per day was unhealthy.
The ancient Roman city of Pompeii has been frequently featured in literature and popular culture since its modern rediscovery. Pompeii was buried under 4 to 6 m of volcanic ash and pumice in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79.
Ancient Rome played a pivotal role in the history of wine. The earliest influences on the viticulture of the Italian peninsula can be traced to ancient Greeks and the Etruscans. The rise of the Roman Empire saw both technological advances in and burgeoning awareness of winemaking, which spread to all parts of the empire. Rome's influence has had a profound effect on the histories of today's major winemaking regions in France, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain.
Roman Mysteries is a television series based on the series of children's historical novels by Caroline Lawrence. It is reportedly the most expensive British children's TV series to date at £1 million per hour.
Pompeii was an ancient city located in what is now the comune of Pompei near Naples in the Campania region of Italy. Pompeii, along with Herculaneum and many villas in the surrounding area, was buried under 4 to 6 m of volcanic ash and pumice in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.
Herculaneum was an ancient Roman town, located in the modern-day comune of Ercolano, Campania, Italy. Herculaneum was buried under volcanic ash and pumice in the Eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.
The Epistulae are a series of personal missives by Pliny the Younger directed to his friends and associates. These Latin letters are a unique testimony of Roman administrative history and everyday life in the 1st century. The style is very different from that in the Panegyricus, and some commentators maintain that Pliny initiated a new genre: the letter written for publication. The genre of the letter collection offers a different type of record than the more usual history; one that dispenses with objectivity but is no less valuable for it. Especially noteworthy among the letters are two in which he describes the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 during which his uncle Pliny the Elder died, and one in which he asks the Emperor for instructions regarding official policy concerning Christians.
Harry Sidebottom is a British author and historian, best known for his two series of historical novels the Warrior of Rome, and Throne of the Caesars. He is Quondam Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at St. Benet's Hall, Oxford, and lecturer at Lincoln College.
Gail Christina Trimble was captain of the Corpus Christi College team for the BBC television programme University Challenge in 2009 and scored a high proportion of the team's points. While her team won the challenge, they were subsequently disqualified after it was found that one of her teammates had finished his studies while the show was being recorded. Trimble has continued to appear on quiz programmes. She is now a fellow and tutor in Classics at Trinity College, Oxford.
Armand D'Angour is a British classical scholar and classical musician, Professor of Classics at Oxford University and Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Jesus College, Oxford. His research embraces a wide range of areas across ancient Greek culture, and has resulted in publications that contribute to scholarship on ancient Greek music and metre, innovation in ancient Greece, Latin and Greek lyric poetry, the biography of Socrates and the status of Aspasia of Miletus. He writes poetry in ancient Greek and Latin, and was commissioned to compose odes in ancient Greek verse for the 2004 and 2012 Olympic Games.
Jane Mulvagh is an Irish-born journalist and social historian, specialising in British history. She is best known for her history of Madresfield Court, the English country house upon which Evelyn Waugh based his novel Brideshead Revisited.
Rhiannon Ash is a British classical scholar specialising in Latin literature and Tacitus. She is professor of Roman Historiography in the Faculty of Classics, University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford. She was formerly a lecturer at the Department of Greek and Latin at University College, London.
Catherine Joanna Rowett is a British former Member of the European Parliament representing the Green Party of England and Wales, and academic. She is Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. She is known in particular for her work on Greek Philosophy, especially the Pre-Socratic philosophers. She was a Green Party Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the East of England from 2019 until 31 January 2020, when the United Kingdom left the European Union.