Bret Mulligan

Biography

You could say that I am a bit of an "accidental Classicist." Although I was always a voracious reader and wanted to be a teacher ever since my seventh grade social studies teacher let me teach an occasional class, it was only in college, when I took a course on Latin literature in translation, that I discovered Latin and Greek and was bewitched by Classical literature and culture. Classics has been called the first interdisciplinary major, and it is exactly this range and diversity of inquiry that I find so appealing. Now I have the privilege to spend my days discussing great works of art, thorny questions of the human condition, and fascinating moments of our shared history—not to mention helping students learn the languages that will allow them to fully appreciate both the art and cultures of antiquity. Bonam Vitam!

Education

B.A., Wesleyan University

Ph.D., Brown University

Research

My scholarship focuses on the twilight of classical culture, the period now known as "Late Antiquity." One of the first things I learned about Rome was that it "fell" and it is this period—when massive political, ethnic, and religious change transformed Roman societythat continues to draw my curiosity. In particular I'm interested in the adaptive strategies taken by authors when they must contend with a frightening accumulation of tradition, a cultural moment that has many similarities with our own age. The engagement of late antique authors with their artistic predecessors allows me to dabble in the full range of Classical antiquity. And since this period was also when much of Classical culture was packaged for transmission through the medieval period to us, it also serves as an ideal jumping off-point for my interest in the Classical Tradition and the continuing influence of Classical culture.

Current Projects

• The Poetics of Claudian’s Carmina Minora (a book on the playful short poems of "the last pagan poet of Rome")
• Life of Hannibal by Cornelius Nepos: Introduction, Text, and Commentary (Dickinson College Commentaries, Summer 2013).
• Χιονέη Glacies: Translation Techniques in Claudian and the Late Antique Latin Epigram, accepted for publication in The Living Past: Recasting the Ancients in Late Latin Poetry
• The Promiscuous Tongue: Oral Immoderation and Intellectual Mockery in the Epigrams of Claudian and Ausonius (an article on a mode of invective in two late antique poets, with reference to insult in the epigrammatic tradition)
• Drunken Poets and Fallen Philosophers: Gout as a Metaphoric Disease in Antiquity (a substantial article that traces the construction and stigmatization of the disease in antiquity, and its implications on the readings of "gouty" texts)
• Cornelius Nepos in Late Antiquity: Two Studies in Epistolographic Plagiarism and Forgery in Forgeries & Issues of Authenticity in Classical Literature (2014).

Select Recent Publications

My Links

• Tales of Troy
  Website for CSTS215: Tales of Troy (2012S)