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Overview

Dr Edmund Thomas

Associate Professor


Affiliations
Affiliation
Associate Professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History
Associate Fellow in the Institute of Advanced Study
Departmental Rep (Classics) in the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Biography

Edmund Thomas is Associate Professor in Ancient Visual and Material Culture and Associate Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University. His main research interests are Roman architecture and its relation to Roman society and culture and the reception of ancient architectural traditions in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and Baroque periods.

His book Monumentality and the Roman Empire: Architecture in the Antonine Age (Oxford University Press) appeared in 2007. He has written articles on the Pantheon and Septizodium in Rome, on Severan architecture and on Roman epigraphy, Roman sarcophagi and architectural aesthetics, and has jointly authored a work on the historical topography of Winchester from the late Iron Age to 1800 for the Historic Towns Atlas series, which was published by OUP in 2017.

He co-edited volumes of papers on the materiality of inscribed texts in Greek and Roman antiquity with Andrej and Ivana Petrovic and on interactions between animals and humans in classical antiquity with Thorsten Fögen. 

Dr Thomas is presently completing a major monograph on the tectonics of the keystone in Greek and Roman antiquity and within the classical tradition, entitled Keystones: dialogues between architecture, philosophy, and politics.

He is interested in the intersection between architecture and philosophy. His collected volume, The Legacy of Plato's Timaeus. Cosmology, Medicine, Music, and Architecture from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century (co-edited with Jacomien Prins, Utrecht) will be published by Brill in October 2024 in the series Brill Studies in Intellectual History, vol. 353. He has published on the Sublime in architecture and is presently completing a further paper on this subject. He is also working on a study on the relations between architecture and music in Greek and Republican Roman architecture.

He also works on sustainability in ancient architecture. Since 2022, he has collaborated on the project "Solar Technologies of Antiquity: Ancient and Historical Technologies for Climate Action and Energy Conservation" with colleagues at the University of Notre Dame, as part of the Durham-Notre Dame research partnership, and is preparing a collaborative grant proposal. A conference on this subject will be held at Durham in September 2024. He has published a paper on sustainable practices in the architecture of the Roman provinces and a survey of seasonality in imperial Roman architecture.

He has a particular interest in the Baroque both in and after antiquity. His recently published work in this area includes studies of architectural description in Jean de la Roque's early eighteenth-century description of Baalbek; the reception of the Elder Piny's account of Gaius Curio's revolving theatres in the theatre architecture of Bernini; and the descriptions of palaces in early imperial Latin literature and their relation to "Baroque" architecture. 

Other subjects on which he has worked include the spirally fluted column in antiquity, a project sponsored by the British Academy and the Council for British Research in the Levant, the sanctuary of Tyche at Antioch, and the relations between architecture and inscribed text in antiquity and later periods.

He has spent lengthy periods of research in Rome and elsewhere and has been involved in archaeological excavations at Butrint in Albania. He was Balsdon Fellow at the British School at Rome in 2016 and Margo Tytus Visiting Scholar at the University of Cincinnati in 2022. He is also a qualified archivist and has a special interest in the description and management of architectural drawings.

Research interests

  • Roman Architecture
  • Monumentality
  • Ancient Aesthetics
  • Roman Epigraphy
  • Classicism
  • Roman Sarcophagi
  • Vitruvius
  • Light in Architecture
  • Spirally fluted columns

Publications

Authored book

Chapter in book

Conference Paper

Edited book

Journal Article

Other (Digital/Visual Media)

Supervision students