Dr Michael Loy

College

As Director of Studies, I organise the teaching and provide academic guidance for our Queens’ undergraduate students in Classics. I supervise in my specialist subject area of Classical Archaeology, as well as on some papers in Greek and Latin translation. Additionally, I organise study skills workshops for the Classicists, masterclasses which complement our formal teaching and which provide opportunities for students across all year groups to learn from each other.

As Praelector, I am charged at seeing all Queens’ undergraduate and graduate students through their graduation ceremonies. It is good to have a Classicist on-hand, as the whole ceremony is —according to the traditions of the university— conducted in Latin.

For applicants

Classics is a very broad and interdisciplinary subject: you cannot (and should not try to) cover it all! Whatever it is about the ancient world that fires you —whether that be Stoic philosophy, classical Greek sculpture, the tragedies of Euripides— find your niche and really read in depth and extensively for that area.

The Classics BA at Cambridge is in its first years very linguistically focussed, and students here are expected to read large amounts of Greek and Latin texts in the original. If you have already been learning the ancient languages at (or outside of) school, make sure that you consolidate this knowledge and have a strong linguistic base: expand your vocabulary, learn your grammar tables, and practise your principal parts!

Research

My research largely blends together threads of Classical Archaeology, Ancient History and Digital Humanities, for the most part asking historical questions of archaeological data. In my most recent major project, I worked on reconstructing political and economic networks for Archaic Greece, particularly through using GIS, R and other tools to make sense of patterns in large datasets of pottery, coins and inscriptions. My wider interests include the history of the east Aegean, landscape and island archaeology, archaeological archives, and museum outreach.

 

Department

I am a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Faculty of Classics, working on a project entitled ‘Cargo and conflict: Aegean networks after the Persian Wars’. This project explores an archaeology of the so-called Athenian Empire, using various digital models to explore the networks, trade routes and exchange systems that underpinned economic activity in the fifth-century Aegean. I also co-direct the ‘West Area of Samos Archaeological Project’, research that every summer takes student volunteers to Greece for practical training in field archaeology.

Subjects
Position
  • Bye-Fellow
  • Director of Studies
  • Praelector