XAVIER BUXTON

Xavier Buxton is a scholar of archaic and classical Greek literature, whose research focuses on Athenian drama, ancient emotions, and early conceptions of the mind. His doctoral dissertation, completed at Oxford in 2023 under the supervision of Felix Budelmann, offers an interdisciplinary examination of ‘good fear’ in Aeschylean tragedy and Athenian culture more broadly, reflecting contemporary research on the emotions in philosophy, sociology and cognitive science. Xavier is now revising the dissertation for publication. He has also co-edited a volume on the imagination in ancient Greece, and has work forthcoming on pathos and the ‘mystic drama’ at Eleusis, choral panic across different dramatic genres, and kinesthetic spectatorship in the prologue of Sophocles’ Ajax.

Before coming to the University of Cyprus, Xavier taught Greek and Latin literature and languages at Warwick and at Oxford. He began his academic studies, however, as an English Literature student at Cambridge (2011, BA Hons, 1^st Class). There he won the Richard Crashaw Scholarship and the Cambridge Quarterly Prize for his dissertation on Shelley’s negotiation of Sappho’s lyric voice. Awarded a Henry Fellowship, he then spent a year as a ‘Special Student’ at Yale, working on the H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) archive at the Beinecke Library, but finding himself increasingly drawn to the Greek poetry by which H.D. herself had been inspired. After a two-year stint as a schoolteacher in Bournemouth, and a year working for a free-expression NGO, Xavier returned to academia in 2016. His graduate studies at Oxford were funded by the Clarendon Fund and the Arts and Humanities Research Council; he has since held research positions at ENS Lyon and the Institute for Classical Studies.  

As a late convert to the discipline of Classics, Xavier maintains a keen interest in the modern reception of ancient literature, especially the translation of archaic lyric and the adaptation of Greek drama for the stage and screen; as a former teacher, he is also enthusiastically committed to outreach work of all kinds. For three years, he coordinated the Warwick Ancient Drama Festival, bringing 500 students from 30 schools for a day of workshops centred on a matinee performance of a Greek play; he writes occasionally about classical subjects for non-specialist publications (The Oxonian Review; Omnibus).