About Daisy Dunn

Dr Daisy Dunn is an author, classicist, and cultural critic. She contributes to a number of newspapers and magazines, and works as an historical consultant. Her first two books, Catullus’ Bedspread: The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet, and The Poems of Catullus: A New Translation, were published by HarperCollins on both sides of the Atlantic in 2016. The same year, Daisy was named in the Guardian as a leading female historian. She is represented for books and media by Georgina Capel at Georgina Capel Associates Ltd.  

 

Daisy’s scholarship focuses on the ancient world and its afterlife from the Renaissance forwards. Her doctorate, which she was awarded at UCL in 2013, spanned eighth-century BC Greece to sixteenth-century Italy. Her thesis explored how the ideas of the ancient poets, including Homer, Virgil, Ovid, and Catullus, were revived and challenged by the humanists of the great courts of Renaissance Italy. Her expertise lies in the history of the late Roman Republic and early Empire, literature of Greece and Rome, and art of Renaissance Italy. She is particularly interested in the Augustan city & propaganda, poetry and its interface with politics, and the reception of classical ideas in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century art and culture.

 

Daisy first read Classics at the University of Oxford, before completing a Master’s in the History of Art at the Courtauld in London, where she was awarded a scholarship for her work on Titian, Venice and Renaissance Europe. In the course of completing her doctorate, Daisy was recipient of the AHRC doctoral award, the Gay Clifford Award for Outstanding Women Scholars, and an Italian Cultural Society scholarship. She has taught Latin at UCL and continues to give talks and lectures in museums, galleries, schools and universities. She was formerly trustee and Executive Officer of the Joint Association of Classical Teachers. She is now Editor of ARGO http://www.hellenicsociety.org.uk/publications/argo/, a journal published by academics through the Hellenic Society, founded in 1879.

 

Daisy contributes features, reviews, and comment articles to The Times, Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, Evening Standard, Spectator, New Statesman, Standpoint, Newsweek, TLS, Literary Review, History Today, The Oldie, Apollo Magazine, Catholic Herald, The London Magazine, and in the US she contributes to The New Criterion and Lit Hub. Representing her former Oxford college St Hilda’s, Daisy played 3 matches of the 2016 University Challenge Christmas Special on BBC 2. Her team, captained by crime writer Val McDermid, won the series. Daisy has contributed to the BBC World Service, and in 2015 her essay ‘An Unlikely Friendship: Oscar Wilde and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’ was longlisted for the international £20,000 Notting Hill Editions Essay Prize. She is working on her third book.