Dr. Hamish Williams

Hamish Williams (BA, MA, PhD in Classics, University of Cape Town; BSc in Psychology, University of Groningen) has taught Classics (Latin and Greek), general literary studies, and creative writing at universities in South Africa and the Netherlands. He has held a Junior Fellowship at the Polish Institute of Advanced Studies in Warsaw and Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowships at the Institute of English and American Studies, Friedrich Schiller University Jena.

His research studies cultural constructs such as utopianism, hospitality, the sublime, and decline and fall in literature, both ancient and modern. His publications include Tolkien and the Classical World (ed., 2021, Walking Tree Publishers); The Ancient Sea: The Utopian and Catastrophic in Classical Narratives and Their Reception (ed., 2022, Liverpool University Press); and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Utopianism and the Classics (2023, Bloomsbury). His current work-in-progress, Thinking through the Minoan in English Fiction and Non-Fiction (Liverpool University Press, forthcoming 2028), examines modern English receptions of Minoan Crete, including fiction by Mary Renault, Robert Graves, and Lawrence Durrell.

Alongside his academic works, he also publishes fantasy fiction. The first two volumes of his Tales from Basthinia series, published by the Dutch independent press De Wereld Leest, are The Southern Tide (2021) and Under the Green Cloud (2025).

At Signum University (Space), Hamish offers a wide range of humanistic and literary courses, including ‘Tolkien and the Classical World’, ‘Creative Writing Skills: Critical Fantasy’, ‘Basic Latin’ (six-module series), and ‘Representing Utopia through the Ages’.