N. Gregson Davis | Scholars@Duke

N. Gregson Davis
Professor Emeritus of Classical Studies

My primary field of research in Classical Studies is ancient Greek and Latin poetry, and the focus of my published work is on the interpretation of the poetry of the major Augustan poets, Horace, Vergil and Ovid. I also pursue research in contemporary Caribbean Literature, with special emphasis on the Francophone and Anglophone literary traditions (particularly the poetry of the Martinican, Aimé Césaire, and the St.Lucian, Derek Walcott). My current work explores the interconnections between philosophy (especially ethics) and poetry in Augustan literature.

Current Research Interests

Greek and Latin poetry
Francophone Caribbean Literature
Anglophone Caribbean Literature

Office Hours

W 4:30 to 5:30 PM
Office Location Allen 233E

Current Appointments & Affiliations

Professor Emeritus of Classical Studies, Classical Studies, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences 2020

Contact Information

233G Allen Building, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708
Box 90103, Durham, NC 27708-0103
gdav@duke.edu (919) 684-3779
http://www.duke.edu/web/classics/~gdav

Background
Education, Training, & Certifications
- Ph.D., University of California - Berkeley 1969
- B.A., Harvard University 1960
Duke Appointment History
- Research Professor of Classical Studies, Classical Studies, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences 2013 - 2020
- Interim Chair of Romance Studies, Romance Studies, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences 2016 - 2017
- Professor in Literature, Literature, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences 1994 - 2013
- Professor with Tenure, Classical Studies, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences 1994 - 2013
- Dean of the Humanities, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences, Duke University 2004 - 2009
- Chair, Deparment of Classical Studies, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences, Duke University 1999 - 2003
Recognition
Awards & Honors
Expertise
Subject Headings
Global Scholarship
- Expertise
  - Antigua and Barbuda (Country)
- Research
  - Europe (Continent)
Publications & Artistic Works
Selected Publications
- Books
  - Davis, G. Parthenope: The interplay of ideas in Vergilian Bucolic. Vol. 346, 2012.
  - Davis, G. Virgil's eclogues, 2010.
  - Davis, G. A Companion to Horace, 2010. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444319187.
    Full Text
  - Davis, G. Aimé Césaire. Cambridge University Press, 1997.
  - Davis, G. Polyhymnia: The Rhetoric of Horatian Lyric Discourse. University of California Press, 1991.
  - Davis, G. Non-Vicious Circle: Twenty Poems of Aimé Césaire. Stanford University Press, 1984.
  - Davis, Gregson. The Death of Procris "Amor" and the Hunt in Ovid's Metamorphoses, 1983.
  - Davis, G., and M. Davis. Antigua Black: Portrait of an Island People. Scrimshaw Press, 1971.
- Academic Articles
  - Crichlow, M. A., and G. Davis. “Introduction.” South Atlantic Quarterly 115, no. 3 (July 1, 2016): 437–40. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-3608565.
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  - Davis, G. “Forging a caribbean literary style: Vulgar eloquence and the language of césaire's cahier d'un retour au pays natal.” South Atlantic Quarterly 115, no. 3 (July 1, 2016): 457–67. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-3608587.
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  - Davis, G. “A, virgo infelix, quae te dementia cepit?: The Epicurean Critique of amor insanus.” Vergilius 57 (2011): 35–54.
  - Davis, G. “Negritude-as-performance: The interplay of efficacious and inefficacious speech acts in Cahier d'un retour au pays natal.” Research in African Literatures 41, no. 1 (February 16, 2010): 142–54. https://doi.org/10.2979/RAL.2010.41.1.142.
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  - Davis, G. “Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park: the Antigua Collection,” 2004.
  - Davis, G. “Ait Phaselus: The Caricature of Stylistic Inelegance in Catullus 4".” “Materiali E Discussioni Per L’Analysi Dei Testi Classici.” 48 (August 2002): 111–43.
  - Davis, Gregson. “"Pastoral Sites": Aspects of Bucolic Transformation in Derek Walcott's "Omeros".” The Classical World 93, no. 1 (1999): 43–43. https://doi.org/10.2307/4352370.
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  - Davis, G. “L'intertextualite comme strategie dans un programme postcolonial: 'Ferrements' d'Aime Cesaire.” Europe 832–3 (1998): 109–18.
  - Davis, G. “''With no Homeric shadow'': The disavowal of epic in Derek Walcott's 'Omeros'.” South Atlantic Quarterly 96, no. 2 (1997): 321–33.
    Link to Item
  - Davis, G. “Cupid at the Ivory Gates: Ausonius as a reader of Vergil.” Colby Quarterly 30.3 (1994): 162–70.
  - Kennedy, D., J. Perky, C. Lougee, M. McCall, P. Robinson, J. Gibb, C. N. Bush, et al. “The discussion about proposals to change the Western Culture program at Stanford University.” Minerva 27, no. 2–3 (June 1, 1989): 223–411. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01102569.
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  - Davis, G. “Ingenii cumba?: literary aporia and the rhetoric of Horace's O navis referent (C.1.14).” Rheinisches Museum Für Philologie 132 (1989): 331–45.
  - Davis, G. “Carmina/Iambi: the literary-generic dimension of Horace's Integer vitae (C.1, 22).” Quaderni Urbinati Di Cultura Classica: Atti Di Convegni 27, no. 3 (1987): 67–78.
  - Davis, G. “Quis...digne scripserit?: The topos of alter Homerus in Horace C.1.6.” Phoenix 41.3 (1987): 292–95.
  - Davis, G. “Silence and Decorum: Encomiastic Convention and the Epilogue of Horace Carm. 3.2.” Classical Antiquity 2, no. 1 (January 1, 1983): 9–26. https://doi.org/10.2307/25010779.
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  - Davis, G. “The Disavowal of the Grand (Recusatio) in two poems by Wallace Stevens.” Pacific Coast Philology 17, no. 1–2 (1982): 92–102.
  - Davis, G. “The Problem of Closure in a carmen perpetuum: Aspects of Thematic Recapitulation in Ovid Metamorphoses 15.” Grazer Beiträge 9 (1980): 123–32.
  - Davis, G. “Ovid Metamorphoses 3.442ff. and the Prologue to Menander's Misoumenos.” Phoenix 32 (1978): 339–42.
  - Davis, G. “Towards a ‘Non-Vicious Circle’: The Lyric of Aimé Césaire in English.” Stanford French Review 1.1 (1977): 135–46.
  - Davis, G. “The persona of licymnia: A revaluation of horace, carm. 2. 12.” Philologus 119, no. 1–2 (January 1, 1975): 70–83. https://doi.org/10.1524/phil.1975.119.12.70.
    Full Text
  - Davis, G. “Ad Sidera Notus: The Rhetoric of Lament and Consolation in Fortunatus' De Gelesuintha.” Agon 1.1 (1967): 118–34.
- Book Sections
  - Davis, G. “Journal of a Homecoming (Accepted).” In Cahier d’un Retour Au Pays Natal by Aimé Césaire, translated by G. Davis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.
  - Davis, G. “Locus of performance and lyric argument in Horace C.3.28 (In preparation).” In Actes Du Colloque de Lyon "La Poésie Lyrique Dans La Cité Antique, translated by G. Davis, 275–84. Lyon, France: École Normale de Lyon, 2015.
  - Davis, G. “The dual function of the umbra-motif in Vergil’s Bucolics.” In Vergilian Studies Dedicated to the Memory of Mario Geymonat, edited by H. C. Günther, 10:89–101. Nordhausen: Traugott Bautz Verlag, 2015.
  - Davis, G. “Aimé Césaire (In preparation).” In Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography, 2015.
  - Davis, G. “Defining a Lyric Ethos: Archilochus lyricus and Horatian melos.” In A Companion to Horace, 105–27, 2010. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444319187.ch6.
    Full Text
  - Davis, G. “Archilochus lyricus and Horatian melos.” In A Companion to Horace, edited by G. Davis, 105–27. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2010.
  - Davis, G. “Aimé Césaire.” In Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought, edited by A. Irele and B. Jeyifo. Oxford University Press, 2010.
  - Davis, G. “Derek Walcott.” In Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought, edited by A. Irele and B. Jeyifo, 2010.
  - Davis, G. “Reframing the Homeric: images of the Odyssey in the art of Derek Walcott and Romare Bearden.” In Oxford Companion to Classical Receptions, edited by L. Hardwick and C. Stray, 401–14. Oxford University Press, 2007.
  - Davis, G. “’Homecomings without Home’: representations of (post)colonial nostos (homecoming) in the lyric of Aimé Césaire and Derek Walcott’.” In Homer in the Twentieth Century: Between World Literature and the Western Canon, edited by E. Greenwood and B. Graziosi. Oxford University Press, 2007.
  - Davis, G. “Wine and the symposium.” In The Cambridge Companion to Horace, 207–20, 2007. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521830028.016.
    Full Text
  - Davis, G. “From Lyric to Elegy: the Inscription of the Elegiac Subject in Heroides 15 (Sappho to Phaon).” In Defining Genre and Gender in Latin Literature: Essays Presented to William S. Anderson on His Seventy-Fifth Birthday, edited by W. W. Batsone and G. Tissol, 15:175–91. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2005.
  - Davis, G. “Consolation in the Bucolic mode: The Epicurean cadence of Vergil’s First Eclogue.” In Vergil. Philodemus, and the Augustans, edited by D. Armstrong, J. Fish, P. Johnston, and M. Skinner, 63–74. University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas, 2003.
  - Davis, G. “Carmina/Iambi: the literary-generic dimension of Horace's Integer vitae (C.1, 22).” In Why Horace: A Collection of Interpretations, edited by W. S. Anderson, 51–62. Wauconda, Ill: Bolchazy- Carducci, 1999.
  - Davis, G. “Beyond Disciplinary Hierarchies in Higher Education.” In Bruce A. Kimball: The Condition of American Liberal Education: Pragmatism and a Changing Tradition, edited by R. Orrill. College Entrance Examination Board, New York, 1995.
  - Davis, G. “Between Cultures: toward a redefinition of Liberal Education.” In African Studies and the Undergraduate Curriculum, edited by P. Alden, D. Lloyd, and A. Samatar, 19–34. Boulder, Colorado & London: Lynne Reicher Publishers, 1994.
  - Davis, G. “Desire and the Hunt in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.” In The Burnett Lectures: A Quarter Century, edited by E. N. Genovese, 142–70, 1993.
- Other Articles
  - Davis, G. “Lyric worlds: Old and New under the sun.” Arts and Sciences Newsletter. Cornell University, 1991.
  - Davis, G. “The mind at the end of the palm.” The Stanford Magazine, 1982.
- Book Reviews
  - Davis, G. “Afro-Greeks: Dialogues between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century by Emily Greenwood (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010).” New West Indian Guide/Neue West Indische Gids, 2012.
  - Davis, G. “Horace’s Narrative Odes by Michèle Lowrie (Oxford 1997).” Classical Review, 1999.
  - Davis, G. “Epic of the Dispossessed: Derek Walcott’s Omeros by Robert D. Hammer (Columbia 1997).” South Central Review, 1998.
  - Davis, G. “Derek Walcott’s Poetry: American Mimicry by Rei Terada (Boston 1992).” American Literature, 1997.
  - Davis, G. “On Césaire, review-essay on Aimé Césaire: le nègre inconsolé by Roger Toumson and Simonne Henry-Valmore (Paris/Fort-de-France 1993); Aimé Césaire: une traversée paradoxale du siècle by Raphael Confiant (Paris 1993); Cahier d’un retour au pays natal ed. Abiola Irele.” Research in African Literatures, 1995.
  - Davis, G. “Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception by Charles Martindale (Cambridge 1993).” New England Classical Newsletter and Journal, 1993.
  - Davis, G. “From a Sabine Jar by L. Edmunds (Chapel Hill 1992).” Classical Journal, 1993.
  - Davis, G. “Metaformations by F. Ahl (Ithaca 1985).” Classical Philology, 1985.
  - Davis, G. “The Art of the Aeneid by W.S. Anderson.” Comparative Literature, 1972.
- Journal Issues
  - Davis, Gregson, Peter Burian, and Jenny Strauss Clay, eds. “Euphrosyne.” Beiträge Zur Altertumskunde. De Gruyter, 2020.
  - Davis, G. “Ut pictura poesis: A testament.” Agenda, December 1, 2003.
  - Davis, G. “The figure of Anacreon in Horatian lyric.” Hellas, 1996.
- Digital Publications
  - Davis, G. “A flag of one’s own? Aimé Césaire between poetry and politics.” Oxford University Press, June 26, 2013.
    Link to Item
Teaching & Mentoring
Recent Courses
Scholarly, Clinical, & Service Activities
Presentations & Appearances
Service to the Profession
- Editorial Board Member. Comparative Literature (Journal). 1991 - 2010 1991 - 2010

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Education, Training, & Certifications

Duke Appointment History

Awards & Honors

Subject Headings

Global Scholarship

Expertise

Research

Selected Publications

Books

Academic Articles

Book Sections

Other Articles

Book Reviews

Journal Issues

Digital Publications

Recent Courses

Presentations & Appearances

Service to the Profession