Hannah has recently completed her PhD at the University of St Andrews, with a thesis entitled, Talking about Politics: Constructing the Res Publica After the Assasination of Caesar.
Her research focuses on the constitution of Rome in the late Republican period, and is particularly concerned with the nature of the constitution and the role that it played in the decline of the Republic in the first century B.C. She is particularly interested in the possibilities of applying critical theory to the study of the Roman constitution, and her thesis employed critical theories about discourse, ideology and social reproduction in order to present a new reading of the Roman constitution as an entity constructed through the political discourse and decision-making processes that were a prominent part of life in the Roman Republic. She plans to continue this line of enquiry in future, applying theoretical approaches to a study of the discourse that took place in Roman political life between the dictatorships of Sulla, in 82-81 B.C., and Caesar, in 49 B.C., in order to explore the part that the constitution itself played in creating the problems that beset the Republic. She is also ambitious enough to hope that her methodology might be relevant outside the study of Roman history.
Since submitting her thesis she has held a six-month DAAD scholarship for early career scholars based at the Universität zu Köln and a two-month early career scholarship at Fondation Hardt in Geneva, and is currently completing two articles for publication. The first examines the way that the Roman constitution evolved by the passing of ‘normal’ legislation, focusing on the statutes that established Pompeius’ commands in the 60s B.C., and the way that they destabilised the constitution while being entirely legal. The second considers the relationship between Sallust’s political thought in the Bellum Catilinae and the contemporary situation in Rome at the time he was writing, arguing that Sallust’s political thought and understanding of the Roman res publica was critically influenced by the events of the 40s.
