Mitchell obtained her BA at the
University of New England (Australia) and then moved to the UK on a
Commonwealth Scholarship in 1991. Mitchell completed her PhD at the
University of Durham in 1994. She published her thesis as
Greeks Bearing Gifts: the public use of private relationships 435-323 BC (Cambridge University Press) in 1997. Mitchell held a
British Academy Post-doctoral Fellowship and Junior Research Fellowship at
Oriel College, Oxford. In 1998 Mitchell was appointed as lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the
University of Exeter becoming associate professor and then professor in 2013. She became the Director of the Centre for Mediterranean Studies in May 2007. the 2016 Douglas MacDowell Memorial Lecture of the
Classical Association of Scotland on
Kingship, law and democracy, a lecture on
Monarchs in Democracy in 2017 for the Institute of Intellectual History at the
University of St Andrews, and a keynote lecture in 2018 at the 18th International Conference for Ancient East-Mediterranean Studies in
Tartu (ICAEM 2018) on
The politics of power: the rise and fall of the Deinomenid dynasty in fifth-century Sicily. Mitchell encourages wider participation in
classical studies through various projects including the creation of
Isca Latina, a project for
state school students to learn Latin, and involvement in the
Classical Association South-West Branch's annual Sixth-form Classics Conference. == Select publications ==