Overview
My name is Robbie Buhite, and I am a third-year PhD student in Classical Studies (Greek and Latin Philology). 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 focused chiefly on the late Republican-era poet, Catullus, and his collection of Carmina, and it has informed and inspired much of my current work on his poetic successors.
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 / Classical (Sappho, Simonides, Ibycus, Mimnermus, Archilochus) and Hellenistic (Callimachus, Theocritus, Apollonius, Moschus, Meleager) Greek poetry 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. I recently presented some of this research at the annual CAMWS meeting in Mobile, Alabama (""Cheeks not Unstained:" Simonides' “Danaë” (fr. 543) and Catullus 38 Reconsidered," CAMWS 2026).
More broadly speaking, I am interested in literary theory and criticism as applied to Classical texts, theories of poetics and poetic composition, the organization and publication of Latin poetry books, images and treatments of the body in Latin poetry, intertextuality and allusion, and the reception of and engagement with Greek literature in Roman literature. I am more than happy to discuss these with fellow colleagues engaging with these matters in their own research, as well as to talk to prospective applicants about my work and my experience in the graduate program.