Josephine Crawley Quinn

Josephine Crawley Quinn
Born	10 September 1973
Academic background
Alma mater	Wadham College, Oxford University of California, Berkeley
Thesis	Imperialism and Culture in North Africa: The Hellenistic and Early Roman Eras
Academic work
Institutions	University of Oxford

Josephine Crawley Quinn is an historian and archaeologist, working across Greek, Roman and Phoenician history. Quinn is a Professor of Ancient History in the Faculty of Classics and Martin Frederiksen Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at Worcester College, University of Oxford.

Career

Quinn obtained a BA in Classics in 1996 from Wadham College, Oxford. She then obtained an MA (1998) and PhD (2003) in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2001–2002, she was the Ralegh Radford Rome Scholar at the British School at Rome. In 2003–2004 she was a College Lecturer in Ancient History at St John's College, and she has been at Worcester College since 2004. In 2008 she was a visiting scholar at the Getty Villa.

Quinn is co-director of the Oxford Centre for Phoenician and Punic Studies, and co-director of the Tunisian-British Excavations at Utica, Tunisia with Andrew Wilson and Elizabeth Fentress.

Between 2006 and 2011, Quinn served as the editor of the Papers of the British School at Rome.

Quinn won the Zvi Meitar/Vice-Chancellor Oxford University Research Prize in the Humanities in 2009. She has published numerous articles and two co-edited volumes, the Hellenistic West, and The Punic Mediterranean. In 2018 Quinn published the monograph In Search of the Phoenicians, described as a pioneering and exhilarating volume, which argues that the idea of the Phoenicians as a distinct, self-identifying group, is a modern invention. The book was awarded the Society for Classical Studies Goodwin Award of Merit in 2019.

Quinn contributes to the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books, and has appeared on BBC Radio Three and Four.

Personal life

Quinn is the daughter of the former MEP Christine Crawley, Baroness Crawley.

Selected publications

• Quinn, J.C. 2010. The reinvention of Lepcis. In Bollettino di Archeologia ON LINE. Roma 2008 - International Congress of Classical Archaeology Meetings Between Cultures in the Ancient Mediterranean.
• Quinn, J. and Wilson, A. 2013. "Capitolia". Journal of Roman Studies 103: 117–173.
• Quinn, J.C., McLynn, N, Kerr and R.M., Hadas, D. 2014. "Augustine's Canaanities". Papers of the British School at Rome 82: 175–197.
• Quinn, J.C. and Vella, N.C. 2014. The Punic Mediterranean: Identities and Identification from Phoenician Settlement to Roman Rule. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Quinn, J.C. 2017. "Translating empire from Carthage to Rome". Classical Philology 112(3): 312–331.
• Quinn, J. 2018. In Search of the Phoenicians. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• How the World Made the West: A 4,000-Year History. Bloomsbury Press, 2024