Jacqueline Arthur-Montagne
Office Address: Cocke Hall B013
Jacqueline Arthur-Montagne is a scholar of Greek literature and cultural history, and a member of the inaugural faculty cohort in the Karsh Institute of Democracy. Her research centers on the texts and practices of ancient education, and how educational institutions shaped the legacy of Classical Greece to the present. In addition to her faculty position, she serves on the Board of the Colloquium for Ancient Rhetoric, co-edits the “Democratic Ideals in Global Perspective” series with the University of Virginia Press, and is a charter member of the Alliance for Civics in the Academy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
Research Interests
Ancient Education; Rhetoric and Literary Criticism; Ancient Narrative.
My research focuses on the literature and cultural history of postclassical Greece. I consider how successive stages of schooling – from grammar to rhetoric – shaped the reception and literary criticism of canonical texts. My first book, Fiction and Education in the Roman World: The Cultivation of the Reader is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, in the series on “Greek Culture in the Roman World.” This study argues that literate education in the Imperial period was designed to equip students with the skills of “fiction competence”: the ability to navigate a variety of fictional media in ancient life and literature. It also evaluates how the genre of the ancient novel subverts and satirizes the conventions of this “fiction curriculum” in classical antiquity. This project, along with much of my work to date, strives for a foundational reassessment of fiction in the premodern world, not as a genre or discursive mode, but as a socio-cultural practice governed by institutions of literary learning. It has also enabled me to collaborate with the Karsh Institute’s efforts to better understand how democracy, education, cultural memory, and media literacy intersect today.
The authors at the heart of my research include both the poets and prose writers at the core of the Greek educational curriculum (Homer, Demosthenes, and Aesop, for instance), and also the Greek educational theorists who strove to contextualize and harness these works for contemporary intellectual and philosophical debates (Plato, Longinus, Plutarch, Hermogenes, and Libanius). The scholarship that most excites me tends to be projects that trace the reception of a particular figure or concept from the Greek literary past to another time and place in the classical tradition. My 2021 article on “The Boy Viewer in Imperial Ekphrasis,” (CP 116:183-207), for instance, traces the presence of child viewers in ancient ekphrastic writing, linking it back to the Platonic notion of the naive gaze.
My latest research project, provisionally entitled The Classical Past in the Ancient Classroom, explores how rhetorical education and declamations on Greek historical themes shaped the cultural memory of Classical Greece in the Imperial period. Students in the Roman world did not study history as an independent discipline but gleaned historical information through a repertoire of school exercises based on historical themes and counterfactual scenarios. I draw on rhetorical manuals and school papyri to investigate how the systematic reenactment, role-play, and even fictionalization of Greek history shaped ancient perceptions of the Classical past, especially in the politically transformed, post-democratic Roman Empire.
I’m country at heart, and so the University of Virginia is a perfect place to combine my love of books and the great outdoors. I live on a small farm near the James River in Scottsville, where I spend many happy hours with my dogs (and chickens!) in the fields, creeks, and woods. That said, I have not found Hesiod, Theocritus, or Vergil particularly practical guides to weed management – or the finer points of dismantling barbed wire fencing.
Selected Publications
Books
Fiction and Education in the Roman World: The Cultivation of the Reader, Greek Culture in the Roman World, Cambridge University Press (forthcoming).
Edited Volumes and Special Issues
“Animals Under Empire,” eds. Jacqueline Arthur-Montagne and Edward Kelting, Special Issue of Arethusa 58.2, 2025.
Hellenistic Literature and Culture: Studies in Honor of Susan A. Stephens, eds. Benjamin Acosta-Hughes, Jacqueline Arthur-Montagne, and Phiroze Vasunia. Bloomsbury Academic, 2024.
Documentality: New Approaches to Written Documents in Imperial Life and Literature, eds. Jacqueline Arthur-Montagne, Scott DiGiulio, and Inger Kuin. De Gruyter, 2022.
Articles
“Making Manimals: School Fables and Physiognomy in the Roman Empire,” Arethusa 58.2: 251–305, 2025.
“Judicial Prayers and Biblical Models in the Story of Apollonius 32,” American Journal of Philology 144.4: 607-643, 2023.
“Through the Eyes of a Child: The Boy Viewer in Imperial Ekphrasis,” Classical Philology 116.2: 183-207, 2021.
“The Comic Latin Grammar in Victorian England,” Journal of Latin Cosmopolitanism and European Literatures 4: 2-31, 2020.
“Symptoms of the Sublime: Longinus and the Hippocratic Method of Criticism,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 57: 325-355, 2017.
“Persuasion, Emotion, and the Letters of the Alexander Romance,” Ancient Narrative 11: 159-189, 2014.
Book Chapters
“The Sparagmos of Parthenope between Ancient Novel and Myth,” in Hellenistic Literature and Culture: Studies in Honor of Susan A. Stephens, eds. Benjamin Acosta-Hughes, Jacqueline Arthur-Montagne, and Phiroze Vasunia, Bloomsbury Academic, 319-327. 2024.
“Copying the Canon: Imperial School Texts as Documentary Traces,” in Documentality: New Approaches to Written Documents in Imperial Life and Literature, eds. Jacqueline Arthur-Montagne, Scott Di Giulio, and Inger Kuin, De Gruyter, 57-78. 2022.