Jane Draycott

My current research project focuses on prostheses and assistive technology in ancient Greece, Rome and the neighbouring civilisations, and I am currently working on a monograph entitled Prosthetics and Assistive Technology in Ancient Greece and Rome. I was awarded an Arts and Humanities Small Research Grant by the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2017 that allowed me to visit museums around the UK to access surviving ancient prostheses and modern replicas of ancient prostheses in order to explore the possibility of creating my own replicas for use in my teaching. Ancient prostheses first came to my attention while I was co-editing the volume Bodies of Evidence: Ancient Anatomical Votives Past, Present and Future, as anatomical votives and prostheses have a certain amount in common. This realisation led me to organise the 'Prostheses in Antiquity' workshop that was funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Classical Association in 2015 (the edited volume of conference proceedings, Prostheses in Antiquity, was published in 2019 by Routledge), and sparked a broader interest in ancient science and technology which led me to organise a 'Medical Machines in Antiquity' workshop in 2017.

I have also recently become interested in the depiction of the ancient world in computer games, and in conjunction with Dr Timothy Peacock in the History Subject Area at the University of Glasgow, was awarded a University of Glasgow ArtsLab Cross-College Research Themes Scheme Grant to fund the 'History and Archaeology in Games and Gaming' symposium, held in May 2018. We are now working on setting up an international research network to bring together academics interested in the depiction of history and archaeology in computer games with members of the games industry. I am currently editing the collection Women in Historical and Archaeological Video Games for De Gruyter, and co-editing the collection Women in Classical Video Games for Bloomsbury.

My previous research project, begun while I was the 2011-12 Rome Fellow at the British School at Rome and completed while I was LKAS Research Fellow in Classics at the University of Glasgow in the period 2016-2018, focused on domestic medical practice in ancient Rome, and resulted in the monograph Roman Domestic Medical Practice in Central Italy from the Middle Republic to the Early Empire (published by Routledge in 2019). During this time I was part of a joint research project focusing on skincare in antiquity with academics from the University of Oxford and Keele University, and curators and archivists from the Royal Pharmaceutical Society's Museum and Library and the Boots Archive, that was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of its Science in Culture: the Lived Environment theme.

My doctoral research project, undertaken in the Department of Classics at the University of Nottingham in the period 2008-2011, focused on health and healthcare in Egypt during the Graeco-Roman period, and resulted in the monograph Approaches to Healing in Roman Egypt (published by Archaeopress in 2012). During this time, as a side project, I began to research Cleopatra VII, Queen of Egypt, and her daughter Cleopatra Selene II, Queen of Mauretania. I have written articles on Cleopatra Selene for both specialist and general audiences, including one entitled ‘Cleopatra’s Daughter’ that was published in History Today, and I am currently working on a historical biography of her for a general audience.