Margaret Williamson
Appointments
Associate Professor Emerita of Classics
Associate Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature
Area of Expertise
Classical literature, especially Greek,
Classical reception,
Classical slave names in eighteenth century Jamaica,
Translation and Adaptation of Greek Drama,
Lyric poetry, especially Sappho
Education
B.A., M.A. University of Cambridge
M.A. University of Toronto
University College, London
Kings College, London
Ph.D. University of London
Publications
Sappho's Immortal Daughters, Harvard University Press, 1995.
'Sappho and the Other Woman', in Re-reading Sappho, E. Greene (ed.), 1996.
'Eros the Blacksmith', in Thinking Men: Masculinity and its Self Representation in the Classical Tradition, eds L. Foxhall and J. B. Salmon, 1998.
The Sacred and the Feminine in Ancient Greece, ed. with S. Blundell, 1998
'The Mirror-Shield of Knowledge: a Classicist in the West Indies in 1825', in M. Bradley, ed. Classics and Imperialism in the British Empire, Oxford University Press, 2010
'Africa or Old Rome? Jamaican Slave Naming Revisited', in Slavery and Abolition vol. 38 no.1, 2017
'Slave Names and Naming in the Anglophone Atlantic.' In Oxford Bibliographies in Atlantic History. Ed. Trevor Burnard. Oxford University Press, 2018.
'Dictionaries as translations: English in the Lexicon', in Liddell and Scott: the History, Methodology and Languages of the World's Leading Lexicon of Ancient Greek, eds Christopher Stray, Michael Clarke, and Joshua T. Katz, Oxford University Press, 2019.
'"Nero, the mustard!" The ironies of classical slave names in the British Atlantic,' in Classicisms in the Black Atlantic, eds A. Lecznar, H. Morse and I. Moyer, Oxford University Press, 2020.
Introduction to excerpts from the travel narratives of Thomas Staunton St Clair and Matthew 'Monk' Lewis in Classics and Race: A Historical Reader, eds Sarah Derbew, Daniel Orrells and Phiroze Vasunia, UCL Press Online, 2025. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800088139
"Jamaican Slave Names in Plantation Inventories, 1731-1788." Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation 6, no. 4 (2025): 278-289. DOI: http://doi.org/10.14321/jsdp.6.4.0278
Williamson, Margaret; Dumpert, Hazel-Dawn; Bell, John, 2026, "Jamaican Slave Names in Plantation Inventories, 1731-1788". DOI: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/7WQPXF, Harvard Dataverse
Works in Progress
Nero and the mustard: injurious naming on 18th and early 19th century West Indian plantations: a book on slave naming practices and their cultural representation, with particular reference to classical names.
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