Richard Thomas
Professor of Greek and Latin
Director of Graduate Studies
Bibliography (pdf)
Richard F. Thomas, Professor of Greek and Latin and Harvard College Professor, was educated at the University of Auckland (B.A. 1972; M.A. 1973), and at the University of Michigan (Ph.D. 1977). He taught at Harvard as Assistant and Associate Professor, 1977-84; as Associate Professor at the University of Cincinnati, 1984-6; as Professor at Cornell University, 1986-7; and has been Professor of Greek and Latin at Harvard since 1987; he was visiting Professor of Latin, University of Venice (Spring, 1991).
He is currently Director of Undergraduate Graduate Studies in the Department of the Classics, and has served as Director of Graduate Studies and Department Chair. He is Co-chair of the Seminar on "The Civilizations of Ancient Greece and Rome," in Harvard's Humanities Center, and he also co-chairs the Faculty of Arts and Sciences' Standing Committee on Public Service. He has served as Director of the American Philological Association and as Trustee and Director of the Vergilian Society; since 2001, he has been a Trustee of the Loeb Classical Library.
His publications include a monograph Lands and Peoples in Roman Poetry: The Ethnographical Tradition (Cambridge 1982), a two-volume text and commentary on Virgil's Georgics (Cambridge 1988), a collection of his articles on the subject of Virgilian intertextuality, Reading Virgil and his Texts (Michigan 1999), a study of the ideological reception of Virgil from its beginnings through the twentieth century, Virgil and the Augustan Reception (Cambridge 2001), and two co-edited books to which he also contributed: with Charles Martindale, Classics and the Uses of Reception (Blackwell 2006), and with Catharine Mason, The Performance Artistry of Bob Dylan, Oral Tradition 22.1 (2007). He also co-edited and contributed to Widener Library: Voices from the Stacks, a special issue of Harvard Library Bulletin (1996). He has published articles, notes and reviews on Hellenistic Greek poetry, on Roman poetry, particularly of the Republican and Augustan periods, on the reception of Classical literature, and on the lyrics of Bob Dylan. He is currently completing a commentary on Horace, Carmen saeculare and Odes 4, and is co-editing with Jan Ziolkowski a two-volume Virgil Encyclopedia. For further details, see his bibliography.
In his teaching and research he is interested in a variety of critical approaches (chiefly philological, intertextual, narratological, reception poetics), and in literary history, metrics and prose stylistics, genre studies, translation theory and practice, the reception of Classical literature and culture, particularly as it relates to Virgil, and the lyrics of Bob Dylan. In the 2009-10 academic year he is teaching an upper-level course on the Aeneid (Latin 106b, fall), a graduate seminar, Virgil and Horace and their 17th and 18th Century Reception (Classical Philology 229, spring), and Advanced Latin Prose Composition (Latin K, spring). In the Harvard Extension School he is teaching two Latin courses: on Cicero, Verrines 2.4 (fall), and Roman Elegy (spring).