Xavier Buxton

I am a scholar and a teacher of archaic and classical Greek literature, especially lyric, drama, and their reception; much of my research focuses on ancient emotions and conceptions of the mind. Lately, I have been concerned with communication of experience, from one body to another, from one place to another, from one time to another, and the role of language in all of this.

I began my academic life in an English department, at Cambridge, but was soon seduced by Sappho and co.. Awarded a Henry Fellowship, I spent a year as a ‘Special Student’ at Yale, digging into the H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) archive in the Beinecke Library. After a two-year stint as a schoolteacher with Teach First in Bournemouth (UK), and a year working for a free-expression NGO in London, I returned to academia to train as a classicist. I completed my graduate studies at Oxford, and have since held teaching positions at Oxford, Warwick, and Cambridge, as well as a research fellowship in Cyprus. I came to UQ in July 2026 to take up a permanent position as Lecturer in Greek Literature.

A full CV, and some of my published work, can be downloaded from my academia.edu page: https://nmsw.academia.edu/XavierBuxton