University of Reading

Faculty Member, Department of Classics

Professor of Classics

About

I am a Latin scholar. My research interests most notably embrace the Latin language, literature, and epigraphy of the Roman Republic. I am an expert in Roman Drama, Plautus and Terence in particular, Roman verse inscriptions (Carmina Latina Epigraphica), and in the study of Latin wall inscriptions (graffiti). I have published widely on Roman Republican poetry, including an edition and commentary of the so-called Saturnian Verse Inscriptions (Carmina Saturnia Epigraphica, 2002), a full-scale introduction to Terence (Terenz, 2004), a study of Wackernagel's Law in the Republican inscriptions (Römische Inschriften und Wackernagels Gesetz, 2004), a study of the development of Roman didactic poetry in the Republican era (Das vorklassische Lehrgedicht der Römer, 2005), a conference volume reassessing text, language, metre, and poetics of Terence (Terentius Poeta, 2007), and a handbook on the Carmina Latina Epigraphica of the Republican period (Die metrischen Inschriften der römischen Republik, 2007).

Currently my main research activities are organised around four distinct strands:

    * Roman song culture (with particular emphasis on subliterary sources such as the Carmina Latina Epigraphica) and performing arts
    * Latin wall inscriptions of the Vesuvian settlements Pompeii and Herculaneum (and beyond)
    * Latin linguistics and Latin metre
    * Julius Caesar's commentaries on the Gallic War

I am about to finalise a new introduction to Roman metre as well as a ground-breaking re-assessment of the use of Latin subject pronouns. I am also responsible for the edition of a new supplement to Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum IV, containing the wall inscriptions of the Vesuvian cities.

Future projects will most notably include a new commentary on Caesar's Bellum Gallicum as well as an edition of the fragments of the Roman Republican playwright Accius.

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