Neville Morley

„The aim of my project „ Kinesis: reference as principle“ is to understand transformation and change in fifth-century BC Greece, a period which was characterised not only by radical changes in political, social and economic life but also by the emergence of new, critical ways of thinking about change and understanding human society. Our conception of the ancient Greeks is still a rather eighteenth-century one, that they were serene, cerebral lovers of art and philosophy; in fact they were capable of appalling violence, and their societies lived on a knife-edge - but they also reflected on this, and developed intellectual tools that are still useful to us today. My particular interest is the Athenian writer Thucydides, who can be seen as both a pioneering critical historian and the founder of political theory, whose insights into the nature of "the human thing" - what people are like, and why they behave in the ways they do - remain fully relevant.“