Academia.edu Profile

Office Address: Cocke Hall B002

Arthur F. and Marian W. Stocker Professor of Classics. His work concentrates in Latin poetry, particularly its religious background and affinities with Hellenistic poetics. He is the author of Apollo, Augustus, and the Poets (Cambridge, 2009), which was awarded the 2010 Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit by the American Philological Association, Ovid's Elegiac Festivals (Frankfurt, 1991), and numerous articles on various Latin authors. He has also co-edited several collaborative collections on Greek and Roman literature and culture, most recently Tracking Hermes, Pursuing Mercury (Oxford, 2019) and Ovid, Death, and Transfiguration (Leiden, 2023). Currently he is working on Ovid's Fasti and its reception.  

Research Interests

My research has concentrated in Latin literature, especially Augustan poetry. I am very interested in the Hellenistic background of Roman poetry and in Roman religion. Ovid is never far from my thoughts, and in recent years I have become very interested in the reception of Ovid's poetry in Renaissance and modern literature and art. I welcome all theoretical approaches with which we can add to our knowledge of classical antiquity.

Selected Publications (full list)

• Tracking Hermes, Pursuing Mercury, co-edited with Jenny Strauss Clay (Oxford University Press 2019)
• Ovid, Death, and Transfiguration, co-edited with J. Farrell, D. Nelis, A. Schiesaro (Leiden 2023)
• A Handbook to the Reception of Ovid, co-edited with Carole E. Newlands (Wiley-Blackwell 2014)
• Latin Historiography and Poetry in the Early Empire. Generic Interactions, co-edited with A. J. Woodman (Leiden 2010)
• Apollo, Augustus, and the Poets (Cambridge 2009)
• Apolline Politics and Poetics, co-edited with L. Athanassaki and R. Martin (Athens 2009)
• Ovid's Elegiac Festivals: Studies in the Fasti (Studien zur klassischen Philologie 55, Frankfurt & New York 1991)
• “Ovid's Janus and the Start of the Year in Renaissance Latin Calendar-Poems,” in P. Mack and J. North, edd. The Afterlife of Ovid (London: Warburg Institute, 2015) 81-95
• “Virgil's Salian Hymn to Hercules,” Classical Journal 109.4 (2014) 439-63
• “Breaking the Rules,” in The Cambridge Companion to Latin Elegy, ed. Thea S. Thorsen. (Cambridge 2013)
• “Ovid, Flora, and Augustus,” in L. Athanassaki, C. Nappa, and A. Vergados, eds. Gods and Mortals in Greek and Latin Poetry. Studies in Honor of Jenny Strauss Clay (Ariadne Supplement 2, 2018)
• “Robert Pinsky’s Ovidian Creation,” in Euphrosyne: Studies in Memory of Diskin Clay, ed. P. Burian et al. (Berlin 2020).
• “Bacchus and the Exiled Ovid (Tristia 5.3),” in Fiachra Mac Góráin, ed. Dionysus and Rome: Religion and Literature (Berlin and Boston 2020).
• “Teaching Through Exempla in the Ars amatoria: The Case of Pasiphae,” in A. Vergados and J. S. Clay, eds. Teaching Through Images. Imagery in Greco-Roman Didactic Poetry (Leiden 2022) 272–89.
• “Revisiting Closure in Ovid’s Fasti,” in J. Fabre-Serris, et al, eds. Labor Imperfectus (Berlin and Boston 2023).
• “Musing on Ezekiel’s Homer at UVA,” Arion. A Journal of Classics and the Humanities 31 (2023) 1–14.

Personal

Latin and Greek I first learned in Jesuit institutions, at high school in Washington DC and Xavier University's classically-based H.A.B. Program. My graduate degrees were earned at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, first an M.A. in Comparative Literature, then the Ph.D. in Classics. I still feel a deep intellectual debt to the many fine teachers at UNC during that era, especially Brooks Otis, Agnes Michels, and Friedrich Solmsen. After a stint at Minnesota I came to the University of Virginia in 1984 and continue to find it a very stimulating place for classical studies—an added plus is that one can run outdoors in Charlottesville all twelve months. I was Editor of Classical Journal for seven years and served as president of CAMWS, and for the Society for Classical Studies as VP for Program and VP for Professional Matters. From 1999 to 2014 I served as Chair of the Department of Classics.