Professor Matthew Leigh

leigh matthew
Professor of Classical Languages and Literature
Fellow, St Anne's College

Qualifications: MA DPhil Oxf

Link to college page: https://www.st-annes.ox.ac.uk/cpt_people/leigh-professor-matthew/

https://oxford.academia.edu/MatthewLeigh

https://twitter.com/ClassicsSt

Academic Background

I studied at Balliol College, Oxford (1986-91), at St Hugh’s College, Oxford (1991-93), and as a visiting student at the University of Pisa in 1992. I taught Classics and Ancient History at Exeter University (1993-97) and have been at St Anne’s since then.

For the spring semester of 2020 I served as Visiting Professor of Classics at Princeton University.  In the autumn of 2023 I returned to Princeton as a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study.

Research Interests

I have broad interests in Roman culture and tend to work on the borders of Latin literature and Roman history. I have published books on the Roman epic poet Lucan, on Roman Comedy, and on Ancient Concepts of Curious and Meddlesome Behaviour. I am currently working on Roman declamation, writing articles on the politics of the form in the age of Augustus and Tiberius, and producing a commentary on Book 1 of Seneca's Controversiae. My interests in comedy and curiosity came together in a project on classical reception in 18th century drama and freemasonry, which was published as The Masons and the Mysteries in 18th Century Drama (Berlin, 2019). I have a longstanding interest in Roman slavery and am developing a new project employing pre-Civil War American slave memoirs as a way to think through the representation of slaves in Roman Comedy.

Publications

Full Publications: Professor Matthew Leigh full list of publications November 2022
Selected Publications:

'Declamatory Fictions and the Crimen Maiestatis', Journal of Roman Studies 115 (2025), forthcoming

'On Bees, Drones, and Slaves in Vergil and Other Writers', Classical Antiquity 45 (2026), forthcoming

'Juno Trains her Chorus: Statius, Thebaid 12.464-480', Athenaeum 111 (2023), 188-208