Professor Stephen Harrison

Academic Background

I have been a fellow at Corpus Christi College since 1987 and was tutor in Latin there 1987-2020.  Previously I was a post-doc (JRF) at St John’s and a junior lecturer at Magdalen, both in Oxford. But I have also been a visiting lecturer on six continents and worked for some years on collaborative Latin commentary projects in the Netherlands and Germany; I am now an occasional visiting professor at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa and have been a visiting professor/fellow at Princeton IAS and Stanford, Bergen, Copenhagen, Trondheim, La Sapienza (Rome), Siena, Turin,  Sorbonne Université, Jerusalem (Hebrew University), Tel Aviv and the Universities of Canterbury and Otago in New Zealand.

Research Keywords

My main research interests are in Latin literature and its reception, particularly Augustan poetry (esp. Vergil and Horace), the Roman novel (esp. Apuleius) and neo-Latin (esp. the great 16C Scottish neo-Latin poet George Buchanan, whose Silvae I am editing). Recent co-edited volumes include Seamus Heaney and the Classics: Bann Valley Muses (OUP, 2019),  Cupid and Psyche: The Reception of Apuleius’ Love Story since 1600 (De Gruyter, 2020), and Classical Scholarship and Its History from the Renaissance to the Present. Essays in Honour of Christopher Stray (De Gruyter, 2021). A further (joint) monograph on the reception of Apuleius' story of Cupid and Psyche and an anthology of neo-Latin poems by Popes are both in press for 2024, and I am co-authoring two volumes of commentary on classical allusions in WW1 poetry and co-editing books on Latin poetic style and the neo- Latin poetry of classical scholars which should all appear then too. For a full publication list to the end of 2022 see http://users.ox.ac.uk/~sjh/.

Teaching

I am happy to take on new doctoral students in the areas of neo-Latin and the reception of classical Latin literature.

Publications

Selected Publications:

Books

(joint ed. with Chris Pelling) Classical Scholarship and Its History from the Renaissance to the Present. Essays in Honour of Christopher Stray (De Gruyter, 2021)
How to Be Content: An Ancient Poet's Guide for an Age of Excess (Princeton UP, 2020)
(joint ed. with Regine May) Cupid and Psyche: The Reception of Apuleius’ Love Story since 1600 (De Gruyter, 2020)
[joint ed. with Colin Burrow, Martin McLaughlin and Elisabetta Tarantino] Imitative Series and Clusters from Classical to Early Modern Literature (De Gruyter, 2020)
(joint ed. with Fiona Macintosh and Helen Eastman) Seamus Heaney and the Classics: Bann Valley Muses (OUP, 2019)

Selected Recent Chapters/Articles

‘‘Tony Harrison and Rome’, in Sandie Byrne, ed., Tony Harrison and The Classics (OUP, 2022), 57-74.
‘‘A Professor in Scottish Politics: Andrew Melville (1545–1622), Stephaniskion’ in Gesine Manuwald and Lucy R. Nicholas, eds, An Anthology of Neo-Latin Literature in British Universities (Bloomsbury, 2022) 95-122.
‘Papal Paradise: Maffeo Barberini's Verse Letter to Lorenzo Magalotti’, Neulateinisches Jahrbuch 24 (2022) 69-90.
‘Catullus and Poetry in English since 1750’ in Ian Du Quesnay and Tony Woodman, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Catullus (CUP, 2021), 343-62.
‘Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex:  the libretto’, in C.W. Marshall, ed., Latin poetry and its reception: essays for Susanna Braund (Routledge, 2021), 251-62.
‘Framing Epigrams and Elegy in Propertius Book 4’, Papers of the Langford Latin Seminar 19 (2021) 109-21.
‘Victorian Lucretius: Tennyson and Arnold’ in Philip R. Hardie, Valentina Prosperi and Diego Zucca (eds.), Lucretius Poet and Philosopher: Background and Fortunes of ›De Rerum Natura (De Gruyter, 2020) 309–322.
‘Psiche nel XIX secolo: immagini dell’arte’ in Gabriella Moretti and Biagio Santorelli, eds., Latina didaxis xxxiv: Leggere e guardare, Genova, 7-8 maggio 2019 (Genoa, 2020), 85-94 and 128-35.
‘Artefact ekphrasis and narrative in epic poetry from Homer to Silius’ in Christiane Reitz and Simone Finkmann, eds., Structures of Epic Poetry (de Gruyter, 2020), 1.773-806.
‘The Gunpowder Plot: John Milton (1608-1674), In Quintum Novembris’ in L.B.T.Houghton, Gesine Manuwald and Lucy R. Nicholas, eds., An Anthology of British Neo-Latin Literature (Bloomsbury, 2020), 191-214.
‘Greeting Charles V at Bordeaux, 1539: George Buchanan (1506-82), Silvae 1’ in Daniel Hadas, Gesine Manuwald and Lucy R. Nicholas, eds., An Anthology of European Neo-Latin Literature (Bloomsbury, 2020), 119-30.
An Apuleian Masque? Thomas Heywood's Love's Mistress (1634)’, in Bistagne, F., Boidin, C. and Mouren, R., eds., The Afterlife of Apuleius (Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies Supplement 140, 2020), 79-90.

Selected Previous Books

Horace: Odes 2 (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
Victorian Horace: Classics and Class (Bloomsbury, 2017)
Framing the Ass: Literary Form in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses , (Oxford University Press 2013).
Living classics: Greece and Rome in Contemporary Poetry in English, ed. (Oxford University Press 2009).
Generic Enrichment in Vergil and Horace, (Oxford University Press 2007).
A Companion to Latin Literature, ed. (Blackwell 2005)
Texts, Ideas and the Classics : Scholarship, Theory and Classical Literature, ed. (Oxford University Press 2001)
Apuleius: A Latin Sophist, (Oxford University Press 2000).
A Commentary on Vergil, Aeneid 10 , (Oxford University Press 1991).