OpenLearn Profile

Elton Barker

Elton Barker

Classical Studies Department

Professional biography

Elton joined The Open University in July 2009 excited by the commitment openness and keen to contribute to engaging those audiences traditional universities cannot reach. Having attended a state comprehensive school, where there was no offering of Classical Studies, his first encounter with the ancient Greek and Roman worlds was via BBC Children's television and the Jackanory special, Odysseus: the Greatest Hero of them all. Yes, Elton pins the blame for his life-long entanglement with ancient Greek culture and the stories told about it on Blackadder’s Baldrick (Tony Robinson).

Fascinated by Homer's Troy story life-and-death struggles of war (the Iliad) and rollercoaster voyages of discovery (the Odyssey), Elton studied Classical Civilisation at the University of Leeds, followed by an MA in Greek Civilisation and a further MA to learn Greek and Latin at Ohio State (in the US), before embarking on a PhD at Pembroke College, Cambridge. There he also discovered a surprising flair for teaching Greek literature, which took him on a journey from Cambridge, via the universities of Bristol, Nottingham, and Reading, as well as Christ Church, Oxford, to the OU.

As Professor of Greek Literature and Culture, Elton's day job is reading Homer's epics, on which he has published a Beginner’s Guide (OneWorld, 2013) with Joel Christensen, along with tragedy, the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides, and Pausanias. Yet, for the past decade or so, he has also been researching the use of digital methods and tools for exploring the cultural geography of the ancient world. Places mean much more than dots on a map: they fall and rise; they belong to various kinds of networks; each has a life history bound up in the stories told about it. To enable these stories to be told requires combining different online resources from literary texts to material objects. Fortunately, you don’t have to be an IT expert to work with digital technology. Elton works as part of a global network called Pelagios, where people from academia, cultural heritage, and the creative industries each bring different skills to the mix. Collaboration is the name of the game. Best of all, this endeavour is all about making information more open and accessible to all, which perfectly aligns with the core ethos of the OU.

Elton's primary goal remains bringing the ancient Greek world to life, making learning fun, and helping people to think for themselves. The classical world might seem self-contained, but the more you learn about it, the more you see how much it still has to offer on questions of individual identity, social relations, strategies of persuasion, political agency, and embedded structures of power.