Overview
Hi, I'm Robbie, and I am a second-year PhD student on the Greek and Latin philology track. I finished my BA in Classics and English at Loyola University Maryland in 2024 and came to Duke the following fall. My research interests lie mainly in the realm of Roman poetry of the first-century BCE and first-century CE, particularly lyric and elegiac poetry. My undergraduate work and much of my current work has focused on the late Republican-era poet, Catullus, and his collection of Carmina.
In the summer of my junior year at Loyola, I conducted a research project funded through Loyola's Center for the Humanities in which I investigated Catullus' poetics and his engagement with and reception of Archaic (Sappho, Simonides, Ibycus, Archilochus) and Hellenistic Greek poetry (Callimachus, Theocritus, Apollonius, Meleager) in his Carmina. I then wrote my undergraduate honors thesis on Catullus' use of personae throughout the Carmina, focusing specifically on how he constructs and uses various personae, both poetic and amatory, to navigate, test, and transgress traditional Roman social boundaries.
More broadly speaking, I am interested in literary theory and criticism as applied to Classical texts, theories of poetics and poetic composition, intertextuality / allusion, and reception, especially the reception of and engagement with Greek literature in Roman literature.
In the summer of my junior year at Loyola, I conducted a research project funded through Loyola's Center for the Humanities in which I investigated Catullus' poetics and his engagement with and reception of Archaic (Sappho, Simonides, Ibycus, Archilochus) and Hellenistic Greek poetry (Callimachus, Theocritus, Apollonius, Meleager) in his Carmina. I then wrote my undergraduate honors thesis on Catullus' use of personae throughout the Carmina, focusing specifically on how he constructs and uses various personae, both poetic and amatory, to navigate, test, and transgress traditional Roman social boundaries.
More broadly speaking, I am interested in literary theory and criticism as applied to Classical texts, theories of poetics and poetic composition, intertextuality / allusion, and reception, especially the reception of and engagement with Greek literature in Roman literature.