I’m tremendously excited, and feel very honoured, to be taking up the Editorship of the Journal of Hellenic Studies (JHS) at the start of 2021.

JHS has a distinguished history in classical scholarship, and my predecessors as Editor constitute a long line of outstanding classical scholars (all men). It has been publishing articles of the highest quality across the broad field of Hellenic studies internationally since 1880. The journal also performs a major service to the discipline by publishing numerous book reviews, thanks to the efforts of our two Review Editors, Jan Haywood (Open University) and Laurence Totelin (Cardiff University).

Unquestionably, it’s imperative to maintain these high standards of global excellence. My top priority will be to ensure that the journal publishes a varied range of important, world-leading articles of interest across a broad sector of Hellenic studies and classics. We welcome strong submissions from scholars researching any aspect of Hellenic studies. Specialist or technical articles founded on rigorous scholarship will continue to be welcomed, especially those written in a way that demonstrates their importance and relevance across the wider field, beyond a narrow sector of the discipline.

Over the course of the twenty-first century classics has evolved in many new directions, as has journal publishing. Like other long-standing classical institutions, we need to celebrate the diversity of classics, the classical world and classicists in the multifarious ways we think and write about Hellenic studies. I will aim to ensure that diversity in every sense is reflected in JHS.

This is also a wonderful time to take full advantage of the range of features that digital publication offers and we can exploit these more imaginatively. For example, there is scope to use the ‘supplementary data’ feature that online publication offers in order to set out the sources and texts that (which are indeed data) underpin an academic argument, as well as providing additional interpretive aids such as commentary or critical apparatus, or links to other media such as performances, where this is appropriate.

We haven’t had a great start to 2021, and many of us are struggling to find time and space to think and write. But things will get better. I very much look forward to meeting and working with many more of you in the wider community of Hellenic scholarship.

About Lin Foxhall

Lin Foxhall is Rathbone Professor of Ancient History and Classical Archaeology and Dean of the School of Histories, Languages and Cultures.

Previously she was Professor of Greek Archaeology and History at the University of Leicester, and Head of the School of Archaeology and Ancient History, where she was one of the leaders of the team that discovered the body of Richard III. She has held posts at St Hilda’s College, Oxford and University College London, and Visiting Professorships in Germany, Denmark and the USA. She studied at Bryn Mawr College, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Liverpool, where she obtained her doctorate.

Lin is an active field archaeologist and researcher currently working in Southern Calabria, Italy, and has written extensively on agriculture, land use and gender in the ancient Mediterranean (especially Greek) world.

JHS is published by Cambridge on behalf of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies.