Academia
Hannah Swithinbank has recently completed her doctoral thesis, Talking about Politics: Constructing the Res Publica After the Assasination of Caesar, at the University of St Andrews, and looks forward to graduating in the summer. Currently she holds a six month DAAD scholarship for early career scholars and is based at the Universität zu Köln, where she is writing an article on the contemporary influences upon Sallust’s historiography.
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.