Emeritus Fellow in Classics
Classics
Emeritus fellow
A mixture of serious-mindedness and informality which I have always found appealing.
Degrees and honours
MA Oxford, MPhil London, PhD Cambridge; FBA; Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities; Member, Academia Europaea; Honorary PhD, Thessaloniki; 102nd Sather Lecturer, University of California at Berkeley (2016)
Awards and prizes
Premio Internazionale Virgilio (Mantova) (2012)
Research Interests
Latin Literature; Renaissance reception of Latin Literature
Biography
Following my degrees in classics and the classical tradition, I had a three-year spell as a lexicographer working on the Oxford English Dictionary, I returned to classics as a Junior Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Following a year teaching at a liberal arts college in New York, I first came to Cambridge as a teaching fellow at Magdalene College in 1986. On being appointed to a post in the Faculty of Classics I moved up the hill to New Hall, where I spent 11 very happy years (1991-2002), before taking up the Corpus Christi Chair of Latin in Oxford (2002-6). I returned to Cambridge as a Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College in 2006.
Publications
The Oxford history of classical reception in English literature vol. 2 1558-1660, co-edited with Patrick Cheney (Oxford University Press 2015)
Ovidio Metamorfosi vol. 6 Libri XIII-XV (Fondazione Valla 2015)
The last Trojan hero. A cultural history of Virgil's Aeneid (I. B. Tauris 2014)
Rumour and renown. Representations of fama in western literature (Cambridge 2012)
Classical literary careers and their reception, co-edited with Helen Moore (Cambridge 2010)
Lucretian receptions. History, the sublime, knowledge (Cambridge 2009)
(ed.) Paradox and the marvellous in Augustan literature and culture (Oxford 2009)
Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, co-edited with Stuart Gillespie (Cambridge 2007)
Ovid's poetics of illusion (Cambridge 2002)
(ed.) Cambridge Companion to Ovid (Cambridge 2002)
Virgil Aeneid 9 (Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics, 1994)
The Epic Successors of Virgil (Roman Literature and its Contexts. Cambridge 1993)
Virgil's Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium (Oxford 1986)