Dr Maxwell Stocker
IASH Postdoctoral Fellow, September 2024-June 2025
Home institution: School of Advanced Study, University of London
I am a cultural historian who specialises in Archaic and Classical Greek literature and in Graeco-Egyptian studies. Before coming to IASH in Edinburgh, I was an Early Career Research Associate at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, and I previously taught at the University of Glasgow and the University of St Andrews. My research agenda addresses the cultural history of the Graeco-Egyptian relationship from the Early Mycenaean Period to the Classical Period, and aims to develop a new cross-disciplinary platform for bringing together the disciplines of Classics and Egyptology in the 21st century. I have multidisciplinary expertise in Classics and Egyptology, and I am committed to raising awareness of the pivotal and long-neglected topic of Egyptian cultural and literary influences on the Greek world during the second and first millennia BC.
Project Title: Egypt and the Odyssey: Archaic Greek Dialogues with Egyptian Culture and Literature
My ongoing book project is the first comprehensive study of the ancient Egyptian cultural and literary influences on Homeric poetry, a vitally important aspect of Archaic Greek literature which has never been investigated in previous scholarship. Within this overarching remit, the book presents a pioneering study of the as-yet unexplored cross-cultural relationship between the Odyssey and the Egyptian tradition of travel poetry from the Middle and Late Bronze Age. The book demonstrates that the Odyssey was heavily influenced by Egyptian travel poetry and royal narratives. It surveys the full range of different types of Egyptian cultural influence on Homeric poetry, and details the historical processes by which the diverse Egyptian elements and parallels present in the Homeric poems came to be transmitted to the Aegean world. The book will transform our understanding of the oral developmental history of the Odyssey, and of the nature and extent of Graeco-Egyptian cultural interaction prior to the Hellenistic Period.