Professor of Classical Studies
James Uden researches and writes about Latin literature and the transformation of ancient ideas in later eras, especially the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He has published essays on a broad range of topics, including Catullus, Virgil, love elegy, travel literature, and ancient fable. His first book, The Invisible Satirist: Juvenal and Second-Century Rome (Oxford, 2015; paperback 2018), offers a new interpretation of the poems of Juvenal, showing how these texts responded to changing conceptions of Roman identity and contemporary trends in Greek rhetoric and philosophy. His second book, Spectres of Antiquity: Classical Literature and the Gothic, 1740-1830 (Oxford, 2020) explores the work of British and American novelists of the eighteenth century. The Gothic novel, he argues, marked a distinctive break in visions of classical antiquity, rediscovering the ancient world as a shadowy precursor to the horrors of the present day.
Professor Uden’s new project, tentatively entitled The Veins of the Muse: Medicine and Literature in the Roman Empire, is funded by a New Directions grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation . Medicine and the Muse were both introduced late in Rome’s cultural history. But while literature became a vital medium for articulating national values in the Roman Republic, Romans continued to view medical knowledge with suspicion, and persistently stereotyped doctors as foreign and untrustworthy. In studying the cultural boundaries between medicine and the Muse in the Roman Empire, Professor Uden’s project demonstrates the pervasive impact of national ideology and ethnic stereotypes in the period between Greek empiricism and Islamic science.
Professor Uden is passionate about teaching, and in 2016 he won the Gitner Award for Distinguished Teaching in the College of Arts and Sciences [link here]. At Boston University he teaches courses in Roman cultural history (“The World of Rome”, “The History of Medicine in Greece and Rome”), intermediate and advanced Latin language and literature, and in the Core Curriculum (“Late Antiquity and the Medieval World”). He has delivered public talks at BU on various aspects of daily life in ancient Rome, and has lectured in the Core on Homer and Virgil. He welcomes inquiries from prospective students relating to his interests or about the graduate program in Classical Studies.
Research Interests
Latin literature; the literary culture of Roman Greece; Late Antiquity; the transformation of Classical forms in English Literature (esp. in the eighteenth century).
Select Publications
The Invisible Satirist: Juvenal and Second-Century Rome (Oxford University Press, 2015)
‘The Smile of Aeneas’, TAPA 144 (2014) 71-96.
‘Love Elegies of Late Antiquity’, in B. Gold (ed) A Companion to Roman Love Elegy (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).