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Prof Alice König

Director of Impact

Professor

Phone

+44 (0)1334 46 2607

Email

arw6@st-andrews.ac.uk

Office

S18

Location

Swallowgate

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Biography

Alice König graduated from King's College, Cambridge with a BA Hons (First Class) in Classics in 1999. She then studied for an MPhil degree at King's College, Cambridge, and for a PhD at St John's College, Cambridge. She arrived in ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø to take up a temporary lectureship in Classics in 2003, and was successful in securing a permanent post as Lecturer in Latin in 2005.

Teaching

Alice teaches at all levels of undergraduate and postgraduate study, specialising in the literature and culture of the Roman Empire and Peace and Conflict Studies. Honours modules include Roman Civil War Writing, Visualising War and Peace in Antiquity, and '', an innovative 'living labs' module which invites students to research ways in which the study of Classics might help address pressing modern issues. She has also developed a VIP (Vertically Integrated Project) onÌý. She particularly welcomes doctoral students interested in Nervan/Trajanic/Hadrianic literature, intertextuality/literary interactions, technical writing, ancient intellectual history, war stories/Visualising War, ancient peace studies, and 'Applied Classics'/citizen scholarship/the dialogue between academia and activism.

Research areas

Alice's research falls into three distinct areas: intellectual history/the history of science; intertextual, socio-literary and cross-cultural interactions; ancient and modern discourses of war and peace.

In the past, she has researched the social construction of expertise in ancient and modern cultures. She has published on a range of ancient ‘technical’ treatises, focusing particularly on the author and statesman, Sextus Julius Frontinus. His surviving treatises on Roman land surveying, Rome’s aqueduct network and military tactics shed important light on the currency, presentation and functioning of different kinds of knowledge in the Roman world. They also offer a valuable opportunity for us to re-examine ancient attitudes to what we today call ‘technical’ writing. In fact, her study of Frontinus’ works and their socio-political context questions traditional scholarly assumptions about genre, reading habits and the very definition of ‘literature’ itself.ÌýÌý

Alice's work on Frontinus led to her wider study of Flavian, Nervan, Trajanic and Hadrianic literature. In particular, she directed a ground-breaking research project looking at literary and cultural interactions in the first and second centuries CE. Begun in 2011,ÌýÌýproduced two field-changing volumes: one (co-edited with Christopher Whitton) focused on Latin literary and socio-literary interactions, 96-138 CE; and the other (co-edited with Rebecca Langlands and James Uden) looked at cross-cultural interactions between different communities of readers and writers in the Roman empire, 96-235 CE. The aim in both volumes was to refresh intertextuality studies by experimenting with new ways of articulating and studying intertextuality, interdiscursivity and cultural interactions. Both contribute to the wider study of literary communities and cultural interaction across the Roman empire and both make significant methodological contributions to the study of intertextuality in other disciplines.

This work has paved the way to her current research projects,ÌýÌýandÌý. Both projects explore the ways in which interplay between conflict narratives in different media has helped to canonise ideas about war and peace across time and space. Taking ‘narrative’ in the broadest sense of the word, Alice looks at visual representations, epigraphic evidence and cultural memory/oral traditions as well as written texts, with a view to understanding the evolution of discourses of war and peace within and between different communities, and the world-building nature of conflict storytelling. A recent volume (co-edited with Nicolas Wiater) –Ìý– focuses on interplay between a wide array of ancient conflict narratives, from 9thÌýc. BCE-6thÌýc. CE, covering near-Eastern, Jewish, early Christian and Greco-Roman material. Through a series of conferences, internships and outreach projects, Alice has also been laying the groundwork for some publications on interplay between ancient and modern war storytelling.

In 2025, Alice founded theÌý. Mindful that we spend much more time thinking about and representing war than peace, she is using innovative research methods (including speculative history and useful fiction) to excavate ancient experiences and discourses of peace, with a particular focus on people whose voices have been missing from the historical record. Connected with this, she is interested in children and young people's views on conflict, past and present, and in the ways in which ideas of childhood, war and peace inform each other.

This research has inspired a number of outreach projects. Since 2019, Alice has been working with professional theatre companyÌý, first on the development of their 2022 play,ÌýÌýwhich fuses ancient and modern war stories to look critically at our habits of visualising male and female roles in military contexts; and more recently on a new play about peace and post-conflict recovery, titledÌýong After the Labyrinth. She has also runÌý, discussing different approaches to dramatising war on stage and screen. She has run workshops for civilians, looking at the influence of past war stories on modern understandings of conflict; and she draws directly on her research when contributing to regular training courses for British Armed Forces.Ìý

Alice runsÌýtheÌýÌýin 2021 and has since recorded nearly 100 episodes, interviewing a wide range of artists, composers, theatre makers, documentary makers, game designers, museum curators, conflict photographers, journalists, strategists, serving soldiers, veterans and academics. The aim of the podcast is to explore how stories or war and peace work, in many different media, and (above all) what they do to us.ÌýThe podcast series has led to a range of new collaborations, including with visual artists, conflict photographers, modern military strategists and NGOs, includingÌý.Ìý

Alice is currently developing a new strand of research in partnership with academics in a range of disciplines (in particular, critical security studies, peace studies, childhood studies, and futures literacy) which will look specifically at the forces that shape , and the impact which children's voices can have in shaping how adults approach both war and peace. She is also conducting research into current trends and future opportunities in , collaborating with current learners via a ‘vertically integrated project’ (VIP). She ran a previous VIP from 2022-2024 on ; and she has recently pioneered a new approach to teachingÌý, for which she has won twoÌýs.

In addition to the projects mentioned above, Alice has published on Vitruvius’ÌýDe Architectura; Martial,ÌýEpigramsÌý10; Tacitus’ÌýAgricola; Pliny the Younger’sÌýLettersÌýBk 10; theÌýTacticsÌýof Aelianus Tacticus and Arrian; the didactics of the LatinÌýexemplaÌýtradition; Latin military writing; and Roman civil war.

She has contributed several times to BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time programme, and is regularly commissioned to write more ‘popular’ pieces (e.g. programme notes for the Baverian State Opera’s recent production of Handel’s Agrippina; entries for exhibition catalogues; articles for Ancient Warfare Magazine and The Scotsman).

As a member of theÌýÌýAlice was involved in a range of cross-disciplinary projects that are addressing some of the most challenging issues facing society in Scotland and beyond: for example, on theÌý,Ìý, and theÌý. These projects draw on and feed into her academic research.ÌýAlice now co-directs theÌý.

PhD supervision

• NicholasÌýHallam

Selected publications

• König, A. R., Dunne, J. & D'Young, J., 31 Mar 2025, Visualising war across the ancient Mediterranean: interplay between conflict narratives in different media and genres. König, A. & Wiater, N. (eds.). Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, p. 268-284

  Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

• König, A. R., 31 Mar 2025, Visualising war across the ancient Mediterranean: interplay between conflict narratives in different media and genres . König, A. & Wiater, N. (eds.). Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, p. 1-29

  Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

• König, A. R., 14 Feb 2025, TLS - The Times Literary Supplement, 6359.

  Research output: Contribution to specialist publication › Book/Film/Article review

• König, A., 29 Mar 2025

  Research output: Non-textual form › Exhibition

• Konig, A. R. (Editor) & Wiater, N. (Editor), 31 Mar 2025, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group. 324 p.

  Research output: Book/Report › Anthology

• König, A. R., 31 Mar 2025, Visualising war across the ancient Mediterranean: interplay between conflict narratives in different media and genres. König, A. & Wiater, N. (eds.). Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, p. 244-267

  Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

• König, A., 14 Sept 2024

  Research output: Non-textual form › Exhibition

• Open access
  König, A. R., 10 Apr 2024, In: Journal of Classics Teaching. 25, 49, p. 8-16

  Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

• König, A. R., Meden, O., da Giau, L. & Ryan, M., 2024, Teaching Citizenship.

  Research output: Contribution to specialist publication › Article

• Konig, A. R., 1 Sept 2023, Intertextuality in Pliny's Epistles. Neger, M. & Tzounakas, S. (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 67-96 30 p.

  Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

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