Daniel has recently submitted his PhD in Classical Reception at the University of Oxford, supervised by Prof Fiona Macintosh (St Hilda’s) and Dr Justine McConnell (KCL). His doctoral research was supported by a Doctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Daniel’s research is situated within the subdiscipline of Black classicisms, which seeks to understand how Black creators, artists, writers, and performers have used Graeco-Roman literature, myth, and culture to narrate experiences of racialisation and oppression.
His doctorial project, entitled ‘Possibility from Dispossession’, analysed the use of Graeco-Roman imagery within narratives of enslavement written between 1773 and 1865, considering works from the United States and the Caribbean written in English, French, and Spanish. Focusing on the writings of Charles Hérard-Dumesle, Frederick Douglass, Phillis Wheatley, Hannah Crafts, Martin Delany, and Juan Francisco Manzano, the thesis examined how these writers used their literary works to challenge white supremacist beliefs, to describe their visions of liberation, and to deconstruct and interrogate the colonial apparatus of racialised slavery.
Â
