What is your area of specialization?I work mostly on Latin literature and social history, with some emphasis on women and gender. While my research is mostly word-centered, art, archaeology, and especially the places and spaces of the city of Rome have been key to lots of the interpretive arguments I have made over the years.
What work of art is the most important or interesting for understanding your research, what’s interesting about it, and how did you discover it?
I have a couple of different recent and current projects
that are in part inspired by art. One came out a couple of years ago in the
journal Classical Antiquity and has to do with women’s public nudity in the early Roman empire. The topic
partly came to me because of a set of
weird grave statues that begin to appear in the late 1st century AD where elite
Roman women are depicted naked—usually in Venus poses, so maybe they (or their
families who put up the tombs) didn’t think of the bodies depicted as theirs.
But whatever the case, the statues are strange, with the portrait heads (often
of mature women and with “modern” Flavian period hair-dos) very mismatched to
the bodies. I’d seen them in museums over the years and always been both amused
and a little disturbed by them. These pieces got me thinking about how
women thought about their own bodies and nudity in this period, and I turned
back to literature to think more about it.
A similar head-and-body mismatch is part of my thinking for a long-term project about how Roman men think about (and write about) themselves as men when they begin to age out of many aspects of public life and when their bodies begin to be softened by age. Here’s that piece, the Tivoli General:
Again, a portrait bust, this time of a distinctly aging man, is paired with an idealized (and much younger) body. The statue is a good 150-200 years earlier than the women’s statues, and I think the reasons for this mismatch are very different, but it’s a similarly unsettling experience to view.
Your last question is hard for me—I hate naming
“favorites” of anything! If you mean a book from antiquity, I can’t not say
Vergil’s Aeneid. If you mean a modern book or essay, there are just so many
things that Classics can be that it’s very hard for me to point “all students
of the classics” in one direction. I do think Mary Beard is very good at
showing the ways Classics is alive and part of the modern world. Her little
collection of essays, Confronting the Classics (2013) opens a lot of windows
into the variety of things the Classics can and does do in the world.
