Elena Isayev

Elena Isayev is Professor of Ancient History and Place in the Classics and Ancient History Department at the University of Exeter. She is an expert on migration, hospitality and displacement, particularly in ancient Mediterranean contexts. She works with Campus in Camps in Palestine and she is a Trustee of the charity Refugee Support Devon.

Isayev received her PhD from University of College London for a thesis entitled Indigenous communities in Lucania: Social Organization and Political Forms, Fourth to First Century BC.

Isayev integrates her research about ancient communities in relation to place and migration and applies it to modern contexts. She has worked with artists from Israel, Palestine, and Iraq to examine memory and place, particularly in refugee camps. Her work has been described as highly important and innovative. In 2018 she guest edited 'Displacement and the Humanities: Manifestos from the Ancient to the Present', a Special Issue of Humanities, a peer reviewed, international, open access journal.

Isayev joined the University of Exeter as a Senior Lecturer in 2002, being promoted to Associate Professor in 2015 and Professor in 2017. Her Inaugural Lecture, entitled 'The Sky is Hidden: on the Opening of Language and Borders' was delivered on 7 March 2019. She co-coordinates the 'Routes: Migration, Mobility, Displacement' Centre at the University of Exeter. She is Treasurer for the Council of University Classical Departments.

Isayev is currently a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of London. Her project is 'Beyond Resilience: Innovation from Displacement'. She was a Migration and Mobility Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies, University of Tübingen in July 2018. In 2017 she held a Humanities Research Centre Fellowship at the Australian National University.

In 2009-10 she held a Davis Fellowship at the Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University. Her project was 'Paradoxes of Place: Pausing Motion in Ancient Italy and Now'.