Rate My Professor Andrew Morrison

Professor Andrew Morrison is the MacDowell Chair in Greek in the Classics subject area of the School of Humanities at the University of Glasgow. He joined the university in January 2023 and was appointed Head of Classics in August 2024. Prior to this appointment, he taught at the University of Manchester for over 21 years. His academic background includes undergraduate studies at The Queen’s College, Oxford, followed by graduate studies at University College London. Morrison’s research specializations encompass Hellenistic poetry, especially the works of Callimachus, Theocritus, and Apollonius Rhodius; Pindar and Greek lyric poetry more broadly; Archaic elegy and iambos; Homer, Hesiod, and the Homeric Hymns; Herodotus; and ancient epistolography in Greek and Latin. He is currently authoring a commentary on Callimachus for the Cambridge University Press ‘Green and Yellow’ series. Additionally, he co-directs the AHRC-funded Ancient Letter Collections project, which ran until 2024, in partnership with Roy Gibson at Durham University. This project explores patterns of arrangement in Greco-Roman letter collections from 400 BCE to 400 CE and includes resources such as workshops and a blog.

Morrison received the Henry Wilde Prize in Philosophy during his undergraduate years. His key monographs are The Narrator in Archaic Greek and Hellenistic Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2007; paperback 2011), Apollonius Rhodius, Herodotus and Historiography (Cambridge University Press, 2020; paperback 2023), and Performances and Audiences in Pindar’s Sicilian Victory Odes (Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies Supplement 95, 2007). He has edited Ancient Letters with Ruth Morello (Oxford University Press, 2007) and Lucretius: Poetry, Philosophy, Science with Daryn Lehoux and Alison Sharrock (Oxford University Press, 2013). Notable articles include “Dead letter office? Making sense of Greek letter collections” (Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 2021), “Order and disorder in the Letters of Alciphron” in The Letters of Alciphron (2018), “Erotic Battles? Love, power-politics and cosmic significance in Moschus’ Europa and Eros on the Run” in The Gods of Greek Hexameter Poetry (2016), “Horace’s Epodes and the Greek Iambic Tradition” in Horace’s Epodes (2016), “Narrative and epistolarity in the ‘Platonic’ epistles” in Epistolary Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature (2013), and “Nil igitur mors est ad nos? Iphianassa, the Athenian plague, and Epicurean views of death” in Lucretius: Poetry, Philosophy, Science (2013). His scholarship has advanced understandings of narrative techniques, performance contexts, and epistolary forms in ancient Greek literature.