Savinay Sood
s.sood.1@research.gla.ac.uk
https://orcid.org/0009-0003-1306-1347
Research title: Press X to Interact: Developing a framework to improve archaeological communication with the producers and consumers of Classical Video Games
Research summary
My research focuses on the ways in which the classical past is mediated through mass culture, with a specific focus on video games.
Video games are one of the main ways members of the public engage with, and understand the classical past. It is therefore important to engage with what they are communicating as well as what audiences learn about the past from games. It is also important to engage with the challenges faced by developers, and to interrogate the ways in which archaeologists, classicists, historians and other academic professionals can become better collaborators with developers.
My PhD includes the practice based element of protoyping a video game. The game will be set in Hellenistic Egypt, and aims to represent and highlight aspects of the ancient world that are not conventionally shown in video games.
Supervisors
Grants
- The Nan Dunbar-Jane Gardner Memorial Scholarship in Classics (2025-2028)
- Wadham College Scholarship (2022/3)
- Wadham College Exhibition (2021/2)
Conferences
- Videogames, Cultural Memory and How we view the Ancient World: Hitpoints and History (January 2026) [Online]
- Copy Paste: Visions of the Ancient World in Video Games: Festival of History and Heritage (April 2026) [University of Bristol]
Teaching
University of Glasgow
- 2026/7 - Graduate Teaching Assistant: Archaeology 2A: 20 Things that Changed the World ARCH2004
- 2026/7 - Graduate Teaching Assistant: Classical Civilisation 1A: Myth and Politics in Classical Athens CLASSIC1001
- 2026/7 - Graduate Teaching Assistant: Classical Civilisation 2A: Identities, Ideology and the Hellenistic World CLASSIC2001
- 2025/6 - Graduate Teaching Assistant: Classical Civilisation 1B: Augustan Rome: From Republic to Empire CLASSIC1002
- 2025/6 - Graduate Teaching Assistant: Classical Civilisation 2B: Empire and Identity CLASSIC2002
- 2025/6 - Summer School Supervisor: The Depiction of the Classical World in 21st-century Media
University of Oxford
- 2024 - Guest Lecturer for Wadham College Summer School: Women's Healthcare in Classical Greece
Additional information
I was a team member on Dr Alex Antoniou's Emperor Worship project, digitising and translating inscriptions using Epidoc, a TEI:XML . I am one of the seminar organisers for the University of Glasgow's Archaeology Seminar Series. I also organise and co-run the Narrative Approaches to the Past reading group with colleagues from Information Studies.
In addition to my academic work, I run Musketeer Productions, an Off-West End award winning theatre company.
