Departmental homepageJosephine Quinn was educated at comprehensives in the Midlands before studying at Oxford and Berkeley, where she also taught at San Quentin Prison. She moved back to Europe in 2001 for a Fellowship at the British School at Rome and then held a lectureship at St John’s College, Oxford in 2003-04. From 2004 she taught in the Classics Faculty at Oxford, with a Fellowship at Worcester College, before taking up the Chair in Ancient History at Cambridge in 2025. She co-directed the Tunisian-British archaeological excavations at Utica, and she has held fellowships at the Getty Villa and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books.
Josephine Quinn teaches ancient Mediterranean history and archaeology.
Josephine Quinn works on Mediterranean history and archaeology in a global context. She has a particular interest in ancient North Africa and Phoenician-speaking communities, but she has published articles on topics from Roman imperialism to Athenian sculpture to Numidian architecture to Edwardian education. She is currently beginning a new project on anarchy in the ancient Mediterranean.
How the World Made the West: a 4,000-year history (Bloomsbury 2024; Penguin Random House 2024 (North American edition); Feltrinelli 2024 (Italian translation))
In Search of the Phoenicians (Princeton University Press 2018; La Découverte 2019 (French translation); Marco Polo Press 2022 (Chinese translation); The National Council for Culture, Arts and Letters (Kuwait) 2024 (Arabic translation)). Winner of the Society for Classical Studies Goodwin Award of Merit 2019
The Punic Mediterranean: identities and identification from Phoenician settlement to Roman rule (Cambridge University Press 2014; edited with Nicholas Vella)
The Hellenistic West: rethinking the ancient Mediterranean (Cambridge University Press 2013; edited with Jonathan Prag)
