Mai Musie is an ancient historian and a public engagement professional. She has been a key voice in the UK for engagement with the humanities for over a decade. Her research explores race and ethnicity in the ancient world; she investigates how the ‘other’ is represented in ancient Greek and Roman literary sources. Mai is passionate about exploring the interconnectivity between the ancient Mediterranean world and North-East Africa.
As a public-facing historian Mai has appeared on podcasts, TV, and radio discussing topics such as decolonisation, anti-racism, repatriation, and stories of ancient and modern migration. She has delivered lectures and specialised workshops to higher education institutions in and outside UK, schools and communities, GLAM and other heritage bodies, and charitable/voluntary organisations including the National Trust, the British Museum, and National Museum of Wales. As a public engagement professional Mai has managed a diverse range of access and outreach initiatives and programmes, organised and consulted on history and heritage projects that foster co-curation, co-production, and building equitable relationships between communities and researchers.
Mai is a trustee of Classics for All and The Roman Society. She is the co-founder of the Classics in Communities partnership project between the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and The Iris Project (an educational Classics charity), and the co-editor of the book Forward with Classics: Classical Languages in Schools and Communities. In 2019 Mai was awarded the Classical Association Prize for Outreach. Furthermore, Mai is a board member of Ways of Working (a social enterprise), and Archive for Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD) at the University of Oxford. In addition, she is an external advisor for the Faculty of Classics EDI Committee at Oxford, and a member of NCCPE’s Inclusion Advisory Group for Race Equality.