Welcome

St Andrews is one of the world’s major centres for the study of Roman imperial literature and cultural history. From 2014 to 2024, this Centre provided a focus for research for the large numbers of staff and postgraduates working in that broad area. Members of the Centre worked on the literatures and cultural history of the Roman Empire from the late Hellenistic period right through to late antiquity.

All of the projects within the Centre were tied together by attention to a single overarching question: how were established literary forms reconfigured in response to the political and cultural changes that followed the first sustained contact between Greece and Rome in the second century BC, and especially the new monarchical and imperial order inaugurated by Augustus and developed by successive emperors and dynasties? Much of the work conducted within the Centre broadened our understanding of the interconnectedness of Roman imperial literature and culture (focusing, for example, on overlaps between Greek and Latin, between different regions and different centuries, between prose and verse, Greco-Roman and Christian). At the same time, many projects revolved around individual authors, texts and their local literary communities and probed areas of particular distinctiveness.

On this site you will find information about the people who worked in this area, news about the research projects and initiatives carried out at the university, and information about the opportunities for undergraduate and postgraduate study in this field.