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, make regular visits to North America and Italy, and worked for some years on collaborative Latin commentary projects in the Netherlands and Germany; I am an occasional visiting professor at the Universities of Copenhagen, Trondheim and Stellenbosch and have been a visiting professor/fellow at Princeton IAS, Stanford, Bergen, La Sapienza (Rome), Tel Aviv and the Universities of Canterbury and Otago.

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). My commentary on Horace Odes 2 appeared with CUP in 2017, along with a book for Bloomsbury on the reception of Horace in 19C UK (Victorian Horace; Classics and Class); recent co-edited volumes include Intratextuality and Latin Literature (De Gruyter, 2018), Roman Receptions of Sappho (OUP, 2019), and Seamus Heaney and the Classics: Bann Valley Muses (OUP, 2019).  I am currently working on a further monograph on the reception of Apuleius' story of Cupid and Psyche. For a full publication list 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

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)

 

Chapters/Articles

‘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.
‘Serial Similes in the Battle-Narrative of Vergil’s Aeneid’ in Harrison  et al.  above, 27-38.
‘Apuleius at the court of Louis XIV. Psyché (1671, 1678) and its English version (1675)’ in May and Harrison above, 47-59.
‘Psiche nel XIX secolo: immagini dell’arte’ in Gabriella Moretti and Biagio Santorelli, eds., Latina didaxis xxxiv: Leggere e guardare. Intersezioni fra parola e imagine nella cultura latina e nella sua fortuna: Atti del convegno,  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.

 

Profile

Editorial board member, Athenaeum (Italy), 2020-
Advisory board member, Exemplaria Classica (Spain), 2020-
Consultant, Trends in Classics – Scholarship in the Making (De Gruyter), 2020-
Retired as Tutor in Classics at Corpus 31/10/2020, elected Senior Research Fellow, 1/11/2020

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).