Professor Elena Isayev

Elena Isayev is Professor of Ancient History and Place at the Department of Classics, Ancient History, Religion, and Theology. In her research she explores the ancient world at the intersection of history, literature, art and archaeology, social and political sciences, architecture and geography.

Her research is based on five intersecting strands:

(1) place as intersection of mobilities: a method using movement, not site as starting point of analysis & heritage;

(2) hospitality, asylum, migration, stewardship: hospitality as site of discourse & perceptions of ‘migrants’;

(3) potency of displaced & refugee agency: exposes contexts of power & agency for/of action beyond the state;

(4) excluded & incorporated: interdependence and forms of being out of place of rights, protection & belonging;

(5) common and public space: questions the publicness of public space, highlighting alternative common space. 

For the most up-to-date list of publications, research, and teaching, see Professor Isayev’s CV.

While her investigations always have their starting point in the ancient context, especially that of Roman history, increasingly they have brought Elena into discourse on similar themes in the 21^st century setting. In thinking between the ancient and the present she seeks to situate contemporary concerns in the longue durée and draw on the knowledge base of contemporary experiences, in particular beyond the nation state, to ask new questions of the past and its sources. 

Within the University, and as part of the Department Executive, she has been serving as an Academic Lead, and is part of the  mentors for AURORA programme. She co-founded the Centre for Connectivity in the Roman World and the University Research Network ROUTES: Migration, Mobility and Displacement.

Elena has authored numerous articles, book chapters, edited volumes, and several monographs, including Migration, Mobility and Place in Ancient Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and the upcoming Bodies out of Place: Mediating Sovereignty and Power, Past and Present (Princeton University Press). Recently, she has been leading Imagining Futures through Un/Archived Pasts (AHRC/UKRI funded, 2020-2024), which has over 100 partners and supports some 50 initiatives worldwide, which now also has a legacy IF Repository hosted by the LDRC in Ghana. 

Elena’s historical practice also emerges from her archaeological fieldwork, having served as both a supervisor and director in various archaeological site campaigns. In 2006, she co-directed the excavation of a Bronze Age site at Tegiszhol in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, with Alan Outram from the University of Exeter. Funded by the British Academy, this field school was part of a broader investigation into early horse domestication and settlement in the region during the Bronze Age. Prior to this, Elena directed the excavations of a Medieval to Tudor site in Llanon, Ceredigion, Britain, in 2000. From 1996 to 1998, she led the excavation of a multi-period site at S. Martino, Romagnano Sesia, Italy. In 1996, she served as the assistant site supervisor at the ancient Italic centre of Fregellae. Her earlier fieldwork includes assisting in the supervision of excavations at a Roman villa in Potenza S. Giovanni di Ruoti in 1994 and at Roman villa sites in Cortona and Oppido Lucano in 1993.