Department of Classics
Department of Classics
Anthony Corbeill

Anthony Corbeill

Basil L. Gildersleeve Professor of Classics
apc3m@virginia.edu
434-924-7747

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

Recent Articles and Chapters in Books

  • "Creating Roman Memories of Plautus," Cultural Memory in the Roman Republic. Ed. M. Dinter, C. Guérin, M. Martinho. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (2023). 42-60.
  • "How not to write like Cicero: Pridie quam in exilium iret oratio," Ciceroniana 4.1 (2020) 17-36.
  • "Clodius's Contio de haruspicum responsis," Reading Republican Oratory: Reconstructions, Contexts, Receptions. Ed. C. Gray et al. Oxford: Oxford UP, (2018). 171-190.
  • "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 New Painting of Calypso in Pliny the Elder," Eugesta 7 (2017) 184-198.   
  • "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).