Josephine Quinn

Josephine is currently Professor of Ancient History at Oxford University, and Martin Frederiksen Fellow and Tutor of Ancient History at Worcester College, Oxford. In January 2025 she will take up the Professorship of Ancient History at the University of Cambridge, the eighth person and first woman to hold that position since its creation in 1898. She has degrees from Oxford and Berkeley, she has taught in America, Italy, and the UK, and she co-directed the Tunisian-British archaeological excavations at Utica. She is a regular contributor to the LRB, as well as to radio and television programmes.

Her latest academic book, In Search of the Phoenicians, was published by Princeton University Press in January 2018, and her first trade book, How the World Made the West, was published by Bloomsbury in February 2024. It tells the story of the diverse roots of western civilization from the Bronze Age to the Age of Discovery, and makes the case that understanding societies in isolation is both out-of-date and wrong. It is contact and connections, rather than solitary civilisations, that drive historical change. It is not peoples that make history – people do.

Photo courtesy of Sukant Deepak