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James Davidson

The Knitting Circle: Staffroom

Biography,work.

British classicist.

He went to Manchester Grammer School and then Oxford University where he obtained a degree in classics. He followed this with an MA at Columbia University in New York.

He had hoped to take up dance choreography but realised that he would not be able to afford to do it properly.

He returned to Oxford University and continued with his work in classics at Wadham College. He took a scholarship at St Hugh's, and then became a junior research fellow at Trinity College.

In 1996 he was appointed to a lectureship at Warwick University. In 1999 he moved to Birkbeck College in London, where he became anniversary reader in ancient history.

His first book,Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens, was a re-write of his DPhil thesis.

See also the section onclassical era.

• Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens, 1997, HCOL, ISBN 0002555913 (hardcover).
  1998, Fontana Press, 300 pages, ISBN 0006863434 (paperback).
  Synopsis:"e;The luxury of the ancient world is legendary. The opulence of Imperial Rome and the splendid wealth of Cleopatra and the Pharoahs are sharply contrasted by the apparent austerity of democratic Athens. Eschewing all material indulgences, what did the inhabitants of this wealthy city- state do with all their money? Were they really so spartan in their habits, so sensible and restrained in their outlook?"e;

• One Mykonos, 1999, Profile Books, 128 pages, ISBN: 1861971257 (paperback).

  • On holiday with Dionysiusby Lucy Hodges inThe Times Higher Education Supplement, 20th. August, 1999, page 15. A black and white photograph of James Davidson is printed with the article. "e;HisOne Mykonos, published this summer as one of a series of small paperbacks, is an attempt to produce a new kind of writing that combines travelogue with classical theory and some personal stuff. There are chunks in it for gay men, a large section for history lovers and plenty to titillate general travellers to the Aegean, too."e;

    "e;His intention was to never makeOne Mykonosan academic book. He wanted to do something very different, and conventional academics may object to it. Davidson writes in personal conversational tone, cutting back and forth between mythology, gays on the beach and his own life with B, his unnamed Spanish lover."e;

  • Men, deand Nannoby Simon Goldhill inThe Times Literary Supplement, 28th. April, 2000, page 7. "e;Davidson is renowned as a writer of great style, and it has gained him a large audience, but the very gloss of his style here reflects the reader away from the author.One Mykonosis reserved to the point of the impersonal, and Davidson's studied bon mots on identity seem to emerge from the classical landscape rather than any engagement of an individual life: 'we imagine ourselves as blocks of stone all solid and unchanging, but really we are a relay race and identity is a baton'. Indeed, where the latter part of the volume tries to intertwine a holiday narrative with a lyrical invocation of the fragmentary archeological sense of place and its memory, the first eighty pages are taken up largely with fragments of classical history of Delos, Apollo and Mykonos, and tend more towards Pauly-Wissowa in cut-offs and a tan."e;
    Cut offA letter to the editor from James Davidson inThe Times Literary Supplement, 5th. May, 2000, page 17. "e;I never thought I would see Simon Goldhill being ungenerous to a text, but his description of the first part ofOne Mykonosas 'Pauly-Wissowa in cut-offs' (April 28) is desperately unfair, and I hope nobody believes him. My book is a bit more, and at any rate quite other, than a German encyclopaedia dressing down. I haven't been seen in cut-offs for almost a decade and metaphorically since I can't remember when."e;

• On a Grecian yearninThe Times Higher Education Supplement, 3rd. December, 1999, pages 20-21. "e;Classics has seized the opportunity presented by the internet with a relish that has been matched by few other arts disciplines. Now, still in your pyjamas, from the comfort of your screen, you can search a papyrus database for references to sharp-nosed fish, while an Austrian impersonation of Homer singing plays through your speakers. One immediate effect is that students are much closer to original material."e;

  "e;I am confident that my students will learn more about the ancient world, albeit often in less detail, than I, for all my feats of translatingTimeseditorials into passable Latin, ever did. This is not to denigrate my tutors nor to repudiate the privileges of my education. In many cases the basic work - on sexuality, say, or religion, art, the body or food, or, more specifically, the place of each of these in the context of ancient history and culture - simply has not been done."e;

• Diary, in theLondon Review of Books, 2nd. November, 2000, pages 36-37. Notes on his attempts at a career in dance. "e;I went to see London Contemporary Dance Theatre and Ballet Rambert at the Oxford Apollo and one ofMichael Clark's earliest forays at the Museum of Modern Art, bare-bottomed in Bodymap and long sleeves. There wasn't much more than that going on in London but they did get Merce Cunningham at Sadler's Wells every now and again, and that was a revelation. I went to see every programme and made notes of what I could remember, while waiting at Didcot on successive evenings for the last train home."e;

Biography,work.

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First uploaded 20th. August, 1999.

Last altered 27th. October, 2000