Naoíse Mac Sweeney is a classical archaeologist and ancient historian. Since 2020 she has been Professor of Classical Archaeology in the Institute of Classical Archaeology at the University of Vienna. ^[1]

Early life and education

Mac Sweeney was born in 1982 to Chinese and Irish parents in London. ^{[2] [3]} She studied for an undergraduate degree in Classics at the University of Cambridge, followed by a Master's at UCL in Ancient History. ^[1] She completed a PhD at Cambridge in 2007 with a thesis titled "Community Identity in Protohistoric Western Anatolia". ^[4]

Career

Following her PhD she spent time in policy research working on conflict and international development. ^[5] From 2008 she held a Junior Research Fellowship in the Faculty of Classics and Fitzwilliam College at the University of Cambridge. In 2011 she joined the University of Leicester as a Lecturer in Ancient History and Classical Archaeology. In 2020 she was promoted to Professor of Ancient History at Leicester, before being appointed later the same year as a Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Vienna. ^[1]

Her research focusses on aspects of cultural interaction and identity, with a focus on the ancient Greek world and Anatolia from the Iron Age to the Classical period. ^[6] Her 2018 book Troy: Myth, City, Icon explores the mythic, the archaeological, and cultural significance of Troy. It was short-listed for the 2019 PROSE awards in the category Archaeology & Ancient History. ^{[7] [8]} In 2020 Mac Sweeney received an ERC Consolidator Grant for the project Migration and the Making of the Ancient Greek World. ^{[2] [9]}

She was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2015. ^[10] In 2017, she held a visiting Research Fellowship at Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies. ^[11] Mac Sweeney co-ordinates the international network 'Claiming the Classical', exploring the use of classical antiquity within contemporary political rhetoric. ^[12] Since 2019 she is the academic editor of Anatolian Studies, the Journal of the British Institute at Ankara, ^[13] and served as a judge for the Runciman Award. ^[14] She appeared as a presenter on the BBC TV series Digging for Britain in 2019. ^[15]

Selected publications

Books

• 2011. Community Identity and Archaeology: Dynamic Communities at Aphrodisias and Beycesultan. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
• 2013. Foundation Myths and Politics in Ancient Ionia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• 2014. (ed.) Foundation Myths in Ancient Societies Dialogues and Discourses. University of Pennsylvania Press.
• 2018. Troy: Myth, City, Icon. London: Bloomsbury.
• 2018. (co-authored with Dr. Jan Haywood) Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War: Dialogues on Tradition. London: Bloomsbury.
• 2023. The West: A New History of an Old Idea. London: Ebury.

Journal articles

• 2004. Social complexity and population: a study in the Early Bronze Age Aegean. Papers of the Institute of Archaeology 15: 53–66.
• 2009. Beyond ethnicity: the overlooked diversity of group identities. Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 22.1: 101–126.
• 2010. Hittites and Arzawans: a view from western Anatolia. Anatolian Studies 60: 7–24.
• 2017. Separating fact from fiction in the Ionian migration. Hesperia 38: 379–421.

References

External links

• Naoíse Mac Sweeney publications indexed by Google Scholar
• Naoíse Mac Sweeney at IMDb