Professor Stephen Heyworth

Stephen Heyworth was Bowra Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Wadham College from 1988 to 2025. Throughout this period he taught textual criticism and Latin palaeography to undergraduates and Masters students as well as giving lectures and classes on Latin literature (especially poetry of the first century B.C.). He attended Collyer's Grammar School in Horsham, and then did his undergraduate and doctoral studies at Trinity College, Cambridge, before teaching at the Universities of Sheffield and Leeds. His doctorate was an examination of the manuscript tradition of the Latin elegist Propertius, which led on to an Oxford Classical Text of the poet together with a detailed textual commentary entitled Cynthia. Subsquently he published commentaries on Propertius 3 (Oxford, 2011) and Aeneid 3 (Oxford, 2017), both with his Wadham colleague James Morwood, and Ovid, Fasti 3 (Cambridge, 2019). An Oxford Classical Text of the whole of the Fasti will appear in autumn of 2026; the accompanying textual commentary also contains detailed accounts of the medieval MSS.  He was editor of Classical Quarterly from July 1993 to November 1998.

Supervision: 
I have supervised (solely or with colleagues) doctoral theses that provided commentaries on parts of Catullus, Ovid’s Fasti and Tristia, Statius’ Silvae, as well as monographs on aspects of Latin poetry, especially Propertius, Ovid and Vergil; the Lupercalia; the influence of Latin poetry on the Greek novel; collections of fictional letters in both Latin and Greek; manuscript traditions; even on Cardinal Bessarion’s reception of Plato.  In addition to similar coverage at the Master’s level, I also guided a number of students writing theses on Hellenistic poetry.