Bret Mulligan
Assistant Professor of Classics
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 the cultures that produced it. Optimam 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 society--that 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 political and playful short poems of "the last pagan poet of Rome")
- “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)
- “Bad Scorpion: An Obscene Pun in Martial 3.44” (sometimes a scorpion is not just a scorpion)
- “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)
Recent Publications
- "Animal Play: Bilingual Onomastics and the Arrangement of Statius Silvae 2”, (forthcoming, Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History 16).
- “Ἱερὸς Argus: Bilingual Wordplay in Statius Silvae 5.4.12 ” (Mnemosyne 64 (2011): 471–80).
- “Meditations on a Taut but Happy Class”, Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education 2 (2011).
- “Fortunatus, Venantius Honorius Clementianus”, “Dionysius Exiguus”, “St. Germanus”, “John Cassian”, and “St. Remigius” in Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages, Bjork, R., ed. (Oxford University Press, 2010).
My Links
- Tales of Troy
Website for CSTS215: Tales of Troy (2012S)
Courses: Fall 2012, Haverford
Latin
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Courses: Spring 2013, Haverford
Comparative Literature
Classical Studies
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Greek
Latin
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Religion
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