I was born in Alessandria, Italy, where I first became acquainted with Greek and Roman history attending the local Liceo Classico.  

I took BA (2006) and MA (2008) degrees in Classics at the Università degli Studi di Torino (studying at the Collegio Einaudi), after which I moved to Durham University for three years. There I received a PhD in Classics and Ancient History (awarded in January 2012).  

After my viva in 2011 I moved to Athens for a few months, as School Student at the British School at Athens, before taking up an Alexander von Humboldt Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Mannheim in 2012. I moved to Edinburgh in 2013 to take up a Chancellor’s Fellowship in Classics, and I was made a Reader in Greek History in 2017.  

In 2014 I was appointed Member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Young Academy of Scotland and I was, from January to june 2018, Co-Chair of the Arts and Humanities in Society Working Group. In 2015 I was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in recognition of my research achievements. I was, in spring 2017, Visiting Professor of Greek History at the Università degli Studi di Cagliari. In later 2017 I was appointed Fellow of the Young Academy of Europe, and awarded both the Royal Society of Edinburgh's Thomas Reid Medal for Excellence in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, and the University of Edinburgh Chancellor’s Rising Star Award, in recognition of my research on Greek politics and law. I have been awarded (as Co-I, with Douglas Cairns PI) an ERC grant for the project 'Honour in Classical Greece'. In 2019 I was appointed a Member of Academia Europaea, and in 2022 Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. I was Professeur Invité at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris in 2022, and Visiting Professor of Historical Anthropology of the Ancient World at the Università degli Studi di Siena in 2023. I am also, since 2023, a member of the European Network for the Study of Ancient Greek History (ENSAGH).

I have contributed columns on politics, culture and higher education for newspapers and magazines, most prominently for Il Fatto Quotidiano, an Italian national newspaper, and MicroMega, an Italian cultural magazine.

For my full profile, click here.

For the website of the ERC project Honour in Classical Greece, click here.

I am co-founder, with Lilah Grace Canevaro, of the Network for Working-Class Classicists, coming myself from a working-class background. For the website of the NWCC click here. We have produced (together with Bianca Mazzinghi Gori, Henry Stead and Eris Williams Reed) a UK Class in Classics Report, which we hope will shake up the discipline - in the UK and beyond. It is perhaps the achievement I am most proud of. Here it is: https://www.workingclassclassics.uk/2024/02/25/uk-class-in-classics-report-2024/

I am Chair of the Classical Association of Scotland.

My early research, culminated in the publication of his first monograph (The Documents in the Attic Orators, OUP 2013), was on key documents about Athenian law and institutions. This work was the necessary underpinning for my wider work on Greek political, legal and economic institutions, particularly on the impact of political decision making and legislation on society more broadly. My extensive commentary of Demosthenes’ Against Leptines (De Gruyter 2016) sheds new light on Athenian politics, law and public economy. The study of the social and economic underpinnings of political institutions is also matched in my work by research into ancient philosophical reflections on these topics, culminated in co-authored commentaries of book IV and of books VII-VIII of Aristotle’s Politics. Further articles and edited volumes make contributions to the study of the legacy of Athenian thought, to intedisciplinary work in Greek history and the social sciences, and on a variety of topics from the status of slaves and freedmen in Athens all the way to the development of polis institutions in the Archaic period and of ideologies and practices of law-making vis-à-vis democratization.

I am at the working with Douglas Cairns on a major project about honour (and inequality) in ancient Greece, funded by a grant of the European Research Council. My interest in these topics stems from research on the Athenian honour system and public economy for my commentary on Demosthenes’ Against Leptines. We aim to break new ground in ancient Greek social, political, and intellectual history by bringing recent findings on the links between economic inequality and its psycho-social effects to bear on the society, culture, and economy of classical Greece. Our aim is to understand how the Greeks poleis, Greek society, and Greek authors responded to inequalities of wealth and their corresponding inequalities of status in the way that they lived their lives, developed their political and cultural institutions, and thought about issues of justice, equality, and social cohesion. This project aims to relate what can be gleaned about the economic realities of the classical polis to the exploration of the interpersonal, social, and political tensions that such inequality will have created, with particular reference to Greek conceptions of honour and their role in Greek law, life, politics, and thought. 

https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/mirko-canevaro(618c9387-ff5e-49d4-96ad-8a2efa0862df).html

https://edinburgh.academia.edu/MirkoCanevaro

https://workingclassclassics.uk

https://research.shca.ed.ac.uk/honour-in-greece/

PhD, Department of Classics and Ancient History, Durham University (October 2008 – October 2011; awarded: 2012), 'The documents in the public speeches of Demosthenes: authenticity and tradition', supervised by Edward M. Harris and P. J. Rhodes, examined by Christopher Carey and Andrej Petrovic (passed without corrections).

MA in Filologia e Letterature dell'Antichità, Università degli Studi di Torino (October 2006 - July 2008), 'L’orazione demostenica Contro Leptine. Testo critico, traduzione e commento', supervised by Lucio Bertelli, 110/110 e lode con dignità di stampa.

BA in Lettere Classiche, Università degli Studi di Torino (October 2003 - October 2006), 'L’orazione demostenica Contro Timocrate. Traduzione e commento', supervised by Lucio Bertelli, 110/110 e lode.

Maturità Classica, Liceo Classico G. Plana (July 2003), 100/100 e lode

2023, Visiting Professor, Università degli Studi di Siena

2022, Visiting Professor, EHESS, Paris

2018, Visiting Professor, Università degli Studi di Cagliari

2016–2017, Sabbatical Fellow, IASH, the University of Edinburgh

2013, A. von Humboldt Research Fellow (Return Fellowship), Lehrstuhl für Alte Geschichte Universität Mannheim

2012, A. von Humboldt Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Lehrstuhl für Alte Geschichte Universität Mannheim

2011, Research Fellow (The Richard Bradford McConnell Studentship), British School at Athens

Chair of the Classical Association of Scotland (2023-...)

REF Classics UoA Coordinator, (2017-2021)

Director of Research, Department of Classics (2016-2021)

Treasurer of the Classical Association of Scotland (2015-2023)

HCA Postgraduate Recruitment Officer (2015-2016)

Co-Organizer of the Classics Research Seminars, School of History, Classics and Archaeology (2013-2016)

Member of the RSE Young Academy of Scotland (2014-2018) and Co-Chair of the Arts, Humanities and Society Working Group (2015-2018)