Today at Brown

Professor of Classics Jay Reed describes himself as a historian of ancient Greek and Roman literature and culture. His scholarly work explores questions of cultural identity — of “self” and “other” — in Hellenistic and Augustan poetry.

“These are questions that arise in any culture,” said Reed. “People are always drawing lines between themselves and an ‘other,’ and creating images of the ‘other’ that they can define themselves against — and then redrawing that line. It’s instructive to look at other societies’ paradigms.”

Reed joins Brown from the University of Michigan, where he taught in the Department of Classical Studies since 2001. He earned his B.A. at Yale in 1987 and his Ph.D. in classics from Stanford University in 1993. He’s held previous teaching positions at the Ohio State University and Cornell University. The author of two books, Bion of Smyrna: The Fragments and the Adonis (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and Virgil’s Gaze: Nation and Poetry in the Aeneid (Princeton University Press, 2007), Reed has published more than two dozen articles and reviews in his field.

Reed is collaborating on a scholarly commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses that will be published in an Italian series, contributing the section on books 10 through 12. His next project will be a book-length project focusing on how Augustus’ status as king of Egypt functions in ancient Roman poetry and culture. This year, he will teach undergraduate courses in Latin poetry (Ovid’s art of love and the works of Catullus), a classical civilization seminar on the figure of the dying god in ancient and modern times, and a graduate seminar on Alexandrianism.

John Bodel, chair of the Department of Classics, calls Reed a “rara avis” in the field. “Jay Reed is a scholar who moves with equal ease between the worlds of Hellenistic Greek and Roman Latin poetry and is as much at home in textual as in literary criticism,” he said. “He brings both philological and literary critical distinction to a program that is justly known for both and, in his most recent book, a masterly tour de force of Virgilian close reading, continues a long tradition of excellence at Brown in the interpretation of the central masterpieces of Latin poetry.”