Claire Rachel Jackson is an expert on ancient fiction, specifically the ancient Greek novel, Greek fictional epistolography, and postclassical receptions of novelistic fiction. She completed her PhD at King's College, Cambridge under the supervision of Prof. Simon Goldhill and with the funding of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). After graduating in 2017 she worked as a Language Teaching Associate and Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge and Director of Studies at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, before joinng UGent in January 2020. Between 2020-2024, she was a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC-funded project "Novel Echoes: Ancient Novelistic Receptions and Concepts of Fiction in Late Antique and Medieval Secular Narrative from East to West". From 2025 onwards she is a postdoctoral fellow on the FWO-funded project "Rewriting Romance: Receptions of Chariton's Callirhoe in the First Millennium CE."
Her primary research interests are in novelistic fiction and its reception in Late Antiquity and Byzantium. Her monograph project, entitled Fraud, Forgery, and Falsehood: Theories and Practices of Fiction in the Ancient Greek Novel and its Early Reception, builds on her PhD thesis to argue that, instead of being an immanent feature of narrative or a generic by-product, fiction is uniquely responsive to the cultural contexts of its composition and reception. By considering ancient novelistic fiction as an active negotiation between literary traditions and cultural context, her research sheds new light onto both the literary background and largely unexplored early readership of the novels. As such, her work offers key insight into both the traditionally neglected early reception of the Greek novels and also the theoretical and practical workings of fiction between classical and postclassical contexts.
Forthcoming publications include chapters and articles on Greek novelistic receptions in Musaeus and Aristaenetus, forgery and fictional epistolography, the Byzantine reception of fragmentary novelistic fiction, and the reception of Chariton's Callirhoe and its impact upon postclassical perceptions of the Greek novel as a genre. Her next project will be a monograph on the hitherto underexplored reception of Chariton's Callirhoe in postclassical antiquity, including ancient epistolography, imperial Greek epic, late antique hagiography, and novelistic fiction.
