Books & edited volumes
Once and Future Antiquities in Science Fiction and Fantasy
co-edited with Brett M. Rogers
Bloomsbury Academic, January 2019
In 15 all-new essays, this volume explores how science fiction and fantasy draw on materials from ancient Greece and Rome, 'displacing' them from their original settings-in time and space, in points of origins and genre-and encouraging readers to consider similar 'displacements' in the modern world. Modern examples from a wide range of media and genres-including Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials and the novels of Helen Oyeyemi, the Rocky Horror Picture Show and Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away, and the role-playing games Dungeons and Dragons and Warhammer 40K-are brought alongside episodes from ancient myth, important moments from history, and more.
Frankenstein and Its Classics: the Modern Prometheus from Antiquity to Science Fiction
co-edited with Jesse Weiner & Brett M. Rogers
Bloomsbury Academic, August 2018
Frankenstein and Its Classics is the first collection of scholarship dedicated to how Frankenstein and works inspired by it draw on ancient Greek and Roman literature, history, philosophy, and myth. Presenting twelve new essays intended for students, scholars, and other readers of Mary Shelley's novel, the volume explores classical receptions in some of Frankenstein's most important scenes, sources, and adaptations. Not limited to literature, the chapters discuss a wide range of modern materials-including recent films like Alex Garland's Ex Machina and comics like Matt Fraction's and Christian Ward's Ody-C-in relation to ancient works including Hesiod's Theogony, Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and Apuleius's The Golden Ass.
Classical Traditions in Modern Fantasy
co-edited with Brett M. Rogers
Oxford University Press, January 2017
Classical Traditions in Modern Fantasy is the first collection of essays in English focusing on how fantasy draws deeply on ancient Greek and Roman mythology, philosophy, literature, history, art, and cult practice. Presenting fifteen all-new essays intended for both scholars and other readers of fantasy, this volume explores many of the most significant examples of the modern genre-including the works of H. P. Lovecraft, J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones series, and more-in relation to important ancient texts such as Aeschylus' Oresteia, Aristotle's Poetics, Virgil's Aeneid, and Apuleius' The Golden Ass.
Classical Traditions in Science Fiction
co-edited with Brett M. Rogers
Oxford University Press, January 2015
For all its concern with change in the present and future, science fiction is deeply rooted in the past and, surprisingly, engages especially deeply with the ancient world. Indeed, both as an area in which the meaning of "classics" is actively transformed and as an open-ended set of texts whose own 'classic' status is a matter of ongoing debate, science fiction reveals much about the roles played by ancient classics in modern times. Classical Traditions in Science Fiction is the first collection in English dedicated to the study of science fiction as a site of classical receptions, offering a much-needed mapping of that important cultural and intellectual terrain.
Silence in Catullus
University of Wisconsin Press, December 2013
Both passionate and artful, learned and bawdy, Catullus is one of the best-known and critically significant poets from classical antiquity. An intriguing aspect of his poetry that has been neglected by scholars is his interest in silence, from the pauses that shape everyday conversation to linguistic taboos and cultural suppressions and the absolute silence of death.
In Silence in Catullus, I offer fresh readings of this Roman poet’s most important works, focusing on his purposeful evocations of silence. This deep and varied “poetics of silence” takes on many forms in Catullus’s poetic corpus: underscoring the lyricism of his poetry; highlighting themes of desire, immortality-in-culture, and decay; accenting its structures and rhythms; and even articulating underlying philosophies. Combining classical philological methods, contemporary approaches to silence in modern literature, and the most recent Catullan scholarship, this imaginative examination of Catullus offers a new interpretation of one of the ancient world’s most influential and inimitable voices.
Journal articles & book-chapters
Journal articles
“‘Not the lover’s choice, but the poet’s’: Classical Receptions in Portrait of a Lady on Fire” (invited for Frontières and Antiquipop, June 2020).
“‘Classical Desires’ in Call Me by Your Name” (invited for Antiquipop, 29 January 2018).
“Smell and Sociocultural Value Judgment in Catullus.” CW 109.4 (2016) 465-486.
“Virgilian Underworlds in A. S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book.” CRJ 8.4 (2016) 529-553.
“Medea in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones.” IJCT 23 (2016) 1-20.
“Classical Receptions in Science Fiction” (with Brett M. Rogers). CRJ 4.1 (2012) 127-47.
“per gestum res est significanda mihi: Ovid and Language in Exile.” CP 104.2 (2009) 162-83.
“Pliny and the Dolphin: Or, A Story about Storytelling.” Arethusa 42.2 (2009) 161-79.
“Symbolic Language and Indexical Cries in Lucretius 5.1028-1090.” AJP 129.4 (2008) 529-557.
“The Scent of Language and Social Synaesthesia at Rome.” CW 101.2 (2008) 159-171.
“Aeolism: Latin as a Dialect of Greek.” CJ 102.2 (2007) 115-144.
Book-chapters
“‘A picture that can only ever come in parts’: Filming Sappho’s Poems in Catherynne M. Valente’s Radiance” (for L. Olabarria & A. Quiroga, volume to come).
“The chorus cinaedorum in Apuleius’ Golden Ass” (for T. Gazzarri and J. Weiner, eds., Searching for the Cinaedus in Classical Antiquity, to come).
“Immersivity & other fantasies of antiquity in games” (for E. Cole, ed., volume to come).
“Monsters from Classical Myth in Modern Speculative Fiction” with J. Weiner and Brett M. Rogers (for D. Felton, ed., Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth, to come).
“Interlingual Translation and Metaphysical Transgression in Film Horror” (for R. Armstrong and A. Lianeri, eds., volume on Classics and translation studies to come).
“A Necropolitics of Posthuman Bodies? Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster & The Killing of a Sacred Deer” (for E. Karakantza & A. Velaoros, eds., to come).
“Artifice/ial intelligence? Epic ekphrasis & ancient theory of mind” (for A. Doumouzi and S. Bär, volume on artificial intelligence and Greek epic, to come).
“Greek and Roman Epic in Film Translation” (for R. Armstrong, ed., A Companion to Translation Studies and Ancient Epic, forthcoming).
“'Not so mythical as you think'?: Classical Receptions in Penny Dreadful” (for M. Kleu, ed., volume to come).
“'The beautiful trap inside us': Pandoran Science Fiction & Posthuman Personhood” (for L. Maurice and T. Bibring, eds., Prometheus, Pandora, Adam & Eve, Bloomsbury 2022).
“Middle-Earth as Underworld: from katabasis to eucatastrophe” (for H. Williams, ed., Tolkien and the Classical World, Walking Tree 2021).
“Dante” (invited for C. Pache, ed., Cambridge Guide to Homer, 2020).
“‘The Nearest Technically Impossible Thing’: Classical Receptions in Helen Oyeyemi” (for Once and Future Antiquities, Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).
“Cupid and Psyche in Frankenstein: or, Mary Shelley’s Apuleian Science Fiction?” (for Frankenstein and its Classics, Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).
“Ancient Underworlds in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit” (for CTMF, OUP, 2017).
“Psammetichus’ Experiment and Modern Thought about Language” (for V. Zali and J. Priestley, eds., Companion to the Reception of Herodotus in Antiquity and Beyond, Brill, 2016).
“Virgil in Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth” (for CTSF, OUP, January 2015).
“Sensory Media: Representation, Communication, and Performance in Ancient Literature” (invited for Jerry Toner, ed., A Cultural History of the Senses, Bloomsbury, 2014).
“Calendar, Roman” (invited for Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Ancient History, 2011).
“Morality and Comics History in Kingdom Come” (for G. Kovacs and T. Marshall, eds., Classics and Comics (Oxford, 2011)).
Online publications & reviews
Online publications
“The Top Sci-Five Classical Receptions on Screen” (invited for OUPblog, 14 April 2015).
“A New Modern Prometheus?” (invited for OUPblog, 6 July 2012).
Reviews
J. Fletcher. Myths of the Underworld in Contemporary Culture: The Backward Gaze. in BMCR.
S. Murnaghan, R. Rosen, eds. Hip sublime: beat writers and the classical tradition. in BMCR.
J. Hunt et al. Classics from Papyrus to the Internet. in NECJ (Spring 2018).
H. Stead. A Cockney Catullus: The Reception of Catullus in Romantic Britain, 1795-1821, in CR.
E. Cavallini, ed., La Nekyia omerica n. trad. di C. Pavese, in BMCR (September 2015).
L. Krisak (trans.), Ovid’s Erotic Poems, in BMCR (July 2015).
L. Krisak (trans.), Gaius Valerius Catullus Carmina, in BMCR (May 2015).
J. Walton, The Just City, invited for Public Books (April 2015).
I. Gildenhard, A. Zissos, eds., Transformative Change in Western Thought, in AJP (135.3).
J. Alison (trans.), Stories of Sexual Transformation from Ovid, in BMCR (August 2014).
A. Morelli, ed., Lepos e mores. Una giornata su Catullo, in CR 64.1 (December 2013).
J. Taylor, Classics and the Bible: Hospitality and Recognition, in BMCR (June 2008).
H. Parker (trans.), Censorinus: The Birthday Book, in BMCR (March 2007).
A. Luhtala, Grammar and Philosophy in Late Antiquity, in LinguistList (December 2005).
R. Munson, Black Doves Speak, in BMCR (September 2005).
J. Lembke (trans.), Virgil’s Georgics, in BMCR (August 2005).