Dr Hannah Mitchell

Assistant Professor in Roman History, Culture, and Society

I studied Ancient History at the University of Sydney (BA Hons, MPhil) and The University of St Andrews (PhD, 2013). I held teaching positions at the Universities of Warwick, Oxford, and King’s College London, and a Marie Curie research fellowship at the University of Gothenburg, before joining Trinity in 2024.

Research Interests

My expertise is in the political culture of the late Roman Republic and its transformation, through civil war, into the Principate of Augustus and his successors. I am fascinated by the Roman Republic as a system of government, and the legacies of its political thought and practices.

I have a particular specialism in the politics of the Triumviral period (43 – 30 BCE), the rhetorical and ideological aspects of the civil war, and the effect on the Roman elite. In both late Republican and Augustan politics, I study the understanding and expression of concepts such as freedom, agency, and neutrality, and I also work on reconstructing the lived, sensory experiences of politics. I am currently researching silence as an aspect of political communication and how this developed in the transformation from Republic to Principate. Some of my other interests include Cicero, imperialism, Latin philosophy, Augustan material culture, literacy, and epigraphy.

Selected Publications

‘On Not Joining Either Side: Elite Neutrality in Roman Civil War’, in A Culture of Civil War? Bellum Civile in the late Republic and the Early Principate, ed. W. Havener, H. Börm, & U. Gotter, Heidelberger althistorische Beiträge und epigraphische Studien (Steiner Verlag), 2023, 31-63.
‘The Dynamics of Elite Agency in a Post-Caesar World (44–31 BCE)’, in Leadership and Initiative in Late Republican and Early Imperial Rome, ed. R. Frolov & C. Burden-Strevens, Mnemosyne Supplement (Brill), 2022, 295-322.
‘The Reputation of L. Munatius Plancus and the concept of “serving the times”’ in The Alternative Age of Augustus, ed. K. Morrell, J. Osgood & K. Welch, Oxford University Press, 2019, 163-81.

Teaching & Supervision

I teach broadly across the Classical Civilisation, Ancient History and Archaeology, and Latin programmes. My current modules are CLU33128 Roman Culture and Society in the Age of Augustus, CLU33211 Explaining the World, CLU22202/4 Culture and Ideology in the Ancient World, CLU11411 Latin in Context I, CLU33410 Latin Independent Project A, and CLU44561 Roman Republican Debates.

I am happy to supervise postgraduate research related to the political and cultural history of the late Roman Republic and early Principate.