Overview
Summary: Latin literature and Roman history with a special focus on the early empire; Roman drama; epic; historical poetry; historiography; theories of cultural and social memory; intertextuality; the age of Nero and its reception; civil war, its narratives, metaphors, and symbol systems.
Narrative: My research and teaching focus on the language, culture, literature, and history of the early Roman Empire. I’m interested in how literature creates, changes, and otherwise mediates how Romans remember their past. One major theme of my work is how Romans conceive of and commemorate their traumatic history of civil war across various forms of literature, including drama, epic, and historiography. Through my research on on Caesar, Lucan, Seneca, Tacitus and other authors I study the symbol systems, tropes, and figures of memory through which Rome gave lasting voice to the disruption and violence of civil war.
Another major area of my research is the age Nero and its reception, the ways in which the image of Nero we have was fundamentally reshaped in the post-Neronian era, and the ways in which people from antiquity to the present have used Nero (and the age of Nero) to talk about leadership, deviance and decadence.
My first book, Staging Memory, Staging Strife, brought these themes together by exploring how the anonymous historical drama, the Octavia, rewrote the memory of Julio-Claudian Rome and Nero its final emperor as a series of civil wars waged between imperial family members (especially women) and between the emperor and his people.
My current book project, Claudia Octavia: People’s Princess, Wife of Nero, aims to excavate the life of Octavia, daughter of Claudius and Nero’s first wife. By bringing together the Big Three of the historical tradition (Tacitus, Suetonius, and Dio) with lesser studied material such as the anonymous drama, Octavia, epigraphic, documentary, and archaeological material, I move beyond the Tacitean image of a silent victim to recover the story of a woman whose notorious popularity was carefully cultivated from her infancy and whom the people loved well beyond her execution for treason in 62 CE. You can get a sense of some aspects of this project through this podcast interview with History Hit: the Ancients in an episode titled Divorced, Murdered, Survived: Wives of Nero.
I am also at work on another book project, Contested Commemorations, on the intersecting and dialogic relationship between Lucan’s epic, Bellum Civile, and Caesar’s own account of the same war, De Bello Civili. Through a series of case study readings, I move beyond the question or Caesar as historical ‘source’ for Lucan as well as beyond the reading of Lucan as an anti-Caesar to explore a complex dialogue about how the internal wars that brought Caesar to power are best remembered. A preliminary version of one of the case studies has appeared in Reading Lucan's Civil War (P. Roche, ed.).
Beyond these major projects, I am working on smaller scale articles and chapters on the reception of Nero in modern print advertising; the representation of landscape and imperialism in the Hercules Oetaeus; the representation of the loyalty of civil warriors in Caesar; the fragments of Ennius’ Andromacha; and the intertextual reception of Caesar’s civil wars in Tacitus’ Annals.
Outside of this academic work, I have a long history of collaboration with theater and opera on classical themes. Most recently this has focused on the new opera, Poppaea, by Michael Hersch and Stephanie Fleichmann, which confronts the violence of Nero’s marriage to Poppaea. You can read my commissioned essay for the world premiere here.
Office Hours
Mondays 12-1pm
Wednesdays 1-2pm
