Dissertation in Mediterranean and European Studies

Steven DeLay is a writer and philosopher living in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. An Old Member of Christ Church, Oxford, he is the author of a number of recent books: Elijah Newman Died Today (2022), Everything (2022), Faint Not (2022), In the Spirit (2021), Before God (2020), and Phenomenology in France (2019). He is also the editor of Life Above the Clouds: Philosophy in the Films of Terrence Malick (2023) and the editor of Finding Meaning: Philosophy in Crisis (2023) based on the series of online essays, “Finding Meaning,” at 3:16 AM. He teaches in post-Kantian philosophy, with a focus in the phenomenological and existential traditions.





Tutor, Ambrose College



Research Interests:

Later prehistoric rock art and portable art in Europe; Bronze Age and Iron Age archaeology in Northern and Northwestern Europe; coastal and intertidal archaeology; human responses to environmental change.



I am currently a Researcher at the Institute of Archaeology and Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, where I manage the Celtic Coin Index Digital project and also run fieldwork on rock art sites in Sweden. I am also the Assistant Editor of Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society. Previously I was a Research Fellow at the Place, Evolution and Rock Art Heritage Unit at Griffith University (Australia) on the Australian Research Council Laureate project: Australian Rock Art History, Conservation and Indigenous Wellbeing. Prior to that, I was a researcher on the Leverhulme-funded project European Celtic Art in Context at the Institute of Archaeology, Oxford and a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College.



I completed my PhD in Archaeology at the University of Reading, for which I created a Scandinavian-wide GIS survey of prehistoric rock art and used this to discuss maritime rock art and human responses to environmental change. The monograph of this research was published in 2015 link. I have an MA Distinction in Maritime Archaeology from the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. Prior to my settlement in the UK, I worked at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (USA) in Conservation and Collections Management. I completed my BFA (University of California, Santa Cruz) and MFA (Tufts University, SMFA) in fine art, art history and museum studies.



University of Oxford

I am an academic and the founder of Woolf. Previously, at Oxford, I was a member of the Faculty of Philosophy, a member of Wolfson College, and a member of the governing Congregation of the University. I also held a Humboldt Fellowship at the Institut für Philosophie, HU Berlin, during which I worked on the definition and measure of human progress. I was especially interested in how modern universities were created to support progress.

Tutor, Ambrose College



I am the Junior Research Fellow Mougins Museum in Classical Art and Material Culture at Wolfson College, and was previously the Research Assistant for the Beazley Archive Pottery Database at the Classical Art Research Centre.



Before moving to Oxford, I held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Edinburgh funded by the Fundación Española para la Ciencia y la Tecnología (FECYT). I received my PhD (Doctor Europaea) from the University of León, Spain, with the dissertation The Snake in the Ancient Greek World: Myth, Rite and Image (2010). I have an MPhil in History of Art from the University of León (2008) and an MPhil in Archaeology and Heritage from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (2011).



In 2010-2011, I worked as a translator at the European Parliament in Luxemburg, and in 2008-2009 I was an Academic Visitor and DAAD Fellow at the Institut für klassische Archäologie of the University of Heidelberg. I have been a Tytus Scholar at the Department of Classical Studies of the University of Cincinnati (US) in the summer 2017.



My research focuses on the art and archaeology of ancient Greece, with an emphasis on vase-painting, animal symbolism, the contextual study of Athenian pottery, and funerary customs from the Archaic to the Late Classical periods. I am most interested in the regions of Attica, Macedonia and Boeotia, and I currently work on Greek material from the Iberian Peninsula.



Wolfson College, University of Oxford