Oliver Parkes

My research centres on Greco-Jewish literature. In particular, I am interested in how Greco-Jewish texts construct space and time and what this can tell us about cultural and literary interactions in the ancient world. For example, how do they network Jewish spaces within a translocal Greek and Roman empire, locate eschatological events in time and space, engage with local and global histories, and relate to different literary traditions? 

For my PhD, I am examining these issues with particular attention to the Sibylline Oracles, a corpus of oracular literature composed, edited, and redacted from the Hellenistic period to late antiquity. Written by Jews and Christians but co-opting the voice of a Greek prophetess, this corpus is a fascinating test-case for how different religious and literary cultures negotiate and re-configure temporal and spatial models from Homer to the Hebrew Bible, from apocalyptic literature to the Church Fathers, from Hellenistic monarchs to the early rabbis. More broadly, I am interested in Hellenistic and imperial poetry, prophetic literature, and spatiality and temporality in ancient literature and society.

I read Classics at St John’s College, Oxford before coming to Cambridge for my MPhil and PhD.