About
Director, Bridge MA in Classical Studies
Advisor, Graduate Certificate in Classical Reception Studies
While I identify as a literary scholar, I draw on a wide range of ancient material to situate Latin literature in broad social and cultural contexts. Most of my publications to date have focused on the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries CE: my book, Transformations of Ovid in Late Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2017), is the first monograph study of Ovid's presence in this neglected period of literary history. The chapters crisscross the Mediterranean—from late Roman Gaul to Vandal Africa and Ostrogothic Italy, and from the Merovingian kingdoms to the imperial court at Constantinople—exploring how various Latin poets responded to the experiences of isolation from Rome that Ovid had described in his writings from exile on the shore of the Black Sea.
I am currently working on a new book, which will show how the satires of Juvenal have shaped ideas about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Arguably, Juvenal was more popular than any other author in Rome from the end of the fourth century; in another age when satire was all the rage, Juvenal's works were devoured by the historian Edward Gibbon, just a year before he conceived of writing his influential history of Rome's decline. Examining how Juvenal informed Gibbon's reading of his late antique sources, my book will draw attention to the role of this most insistently Roman poet in ancient and modern debates about the nature of Roman identity.
Other recent work addresses the role of women as readers and writers of Latin literature, and I am happy to advise students who are interested in the intellectual lives of women in the Roman world.
Fields of Study
- Latin Literature
- Late Antiquity
- Roman Women
- Classical Receptions
Publications
- Transformations of Ovid in Late Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
- 'The authorship of Sulpicia', in T.E. Franklinos and L. Fulkerson (eds.), Constructing authors and readers in the Appendices Vergiliana, Tibulliana, and Ouidiana (Oxford University Press, 2020) 186–97.
- 'Felicitas at Cimitile: cultivating the soul in Paulinus' Nola', Materiali e discussioni per l'analisi dei testi classici 83 (2019) 43–60.
