About me

I was born in the Mediterranean city of Barcelona, the city where I spent most of my first 40 years of life before moving to the UK. I studied Classics at the Universitat de Barcelona (BA 1985, PhD 1991) and at the University of Sheffield (MA 1986). My current position is Senior Language Tutor in Greek and Latin at the University of St Andrews (UK), where I am in charge of the teaching of these two languages. Formerly, I was teaching (also Greek and Latin) at the University of Oxford, Faculty of Classics, from 2003 to 2007, including a year as Lecturer at Merton College.

My main teaching activities with undergraduates at St Andrews are distributed into three areas:

1/ First-year students who either start any of both languages (or both at the same time) from scratch or have already taken an A-level (or equivalent) at high school and have language-reinforcement classes as part of their main subject.

2/ Second year students who go on having language-reinforcement classes (whether they started the language from scratch in their first year or not).

3/ Teaching of Greek Prose Composition and Latin Prose Composition to third- and fourth- year students.

I also teach graduate students who start either of these languages from scratch.

Apart from these teaching activities, I carry out other duties like for instance being the Careers Link for Classics, supervising a doctoral thesis (in another university) about the teaching of Latin, etc., apart from the usual administrative duties that any academic position implies. And, obviously, the production of new materials like for instance the grammars that give title to this site, their books of exercises, the other material presented in the other sections, maintenance of my web site of world news in Classical Greek, etc.

I have developed a growing interest in the usage of Greek and Latin as live languages, and also going on with my studies of other languages takes a lot of my time (currently, Chinese language).

A terrible injury in January 2017 put an end to my intensive marathon dedication (in the category that could be called "high-intensity amateur"), after the five most glorious years I have got in my life sportswise (2012-2016), although I go on running almost daily (but not with two daily training sessions, speed series on the track, etc.). Firenze Marathon in November 2016 was my last one, the injury came while preparing the next one; I did not self-retire, nature retired me...