Academia.edu Profile

Office Address: Cocke Hall B004

Basil L. Gildersleeve Professor of Classics. His research focuses in particular on Roman sexuality, education, and rhetoric. He is the author of Controlling Laughter: Political Humor in the Late Roman Republic (Princeton, 1996); Nature Embodied: Gesture in Ancient Rome (Princeton, 2004); and Sexing the World: Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex in Ancient Rome (Princeton, 2015), which received a 2016 Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit from the Society for Classical Studies. He has recently finished an edition, with introduction, translation, and extensive notes, of Cicero's De Haruspicum Responsis (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Research Interests

My research focuses on the cultural history of ancient Rome, a topic that I normally approach by beginning with a close examination of language and grammar. I have published books on Roman humor and gesture, as well as on the significance of grammatical gender for ancient Latin grammarians and poets, and for an understanding of Roman religion. I have also published on Roman literature and ancient sex/gender.

Selected Publications (full list)

Books

• Sexing the World: Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex in Ancient Rome. Princeton: Princeton UP 2015. Charles A. Goodwin Award of Merit winner, 2016 (Society for Classical Studies).
• Nature Embodied: Gesture in Ancient Rome. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004.           
• Controlling Laughter: Political Humor in the Late Roman Republic. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996. Outstanding Academic Book of 1997 (Choice).
• (co-authored): Horace: Odes and Carmen Saeculare. Trans. S. Lombardo, introduction and notes A. Corbeill. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing 2018.

Recent Articles and Chapters in Books

• "How not to write like Cicero: Pridie quam in exilium iret oratio," Ciceroniana 4.1 (2020) 17-36.
• "Creating Roman Memories of Plautus," Cultural Memory in the Roman Republic. Ed. M. Dinter, C. Guérin, M. Martinho. Forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.
• "Clodius's Contio de haruspicum responsis," Reading Republican Oratory: Reconstructions, Contexts, Receptions. Ed. C. Gray et al. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018. 171-190.
• "A New Painting of Calypso in Pliny the Elder," Eugesta 7 (2017) 184-198. https://eugesta-revue.univ-lille3.fr/pdf/2017/6.Corbeill-Eugesta-7_2017.pdf
• "Invective, Wit, and Irony" and "Anticato." Cambridge Companion to the Writings of Julius Caesar. Ed. L. Grillo and C. Krebs. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2018. 144-156 & 215-222.
• "A Student Speaks for Social Equality in the Roman Classroom (Quintilian, Declamationes Minores 260)," Reading Roman Declamation: The Declamations ascribed to Quintilian. Ed. M. Dinter, C. Guérin, M. Martinho. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2016. 11-23.
• "'A Shouting and Bustling on All Sides' (Hor. Sat. 1.9.77-8): Everyday Justice in the Streets of Republican Rome," The Moving City. Processions, Passages and Promenades in Ancient Rome. Ed. I. Östenberg, S. Malmberg and J. Bjørnebye. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. 89-98.
• "Cicero and the Intellectual Milieu of the Late Republic." Cambridge Companion to Cicero. Ed. C. Steel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013. 9-24.

Personal

After receiving my A.B. in Classics from the University of Michigan, and M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, I spent a transformative year as the SCS (née APA) Fellow to the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae in Munich, Germany. I then taught in the Department of Classics at the University of Kansas for twenty-six happy years, leaving for Virginia in 2017. I have been a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome (1994-1995), subsequent to which I served as editor of Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome and as a Trustee (2014-2016). I have also held visiting appointments or fellowships at Vassar College, the Universities of Wisconsin and Michigan, All Souls and Corpus Christi Colleges (Oxford), and the Institute of Classical Studies (London).