Richard Thomas

Richard F. Thomas, Professor of Greek and Latin, 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 Graduate Studies in the Department of the Classics, and has served as Director of Undergraduate 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 and has since 2001 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. For further details, see his bibliography.

In his teaching and research he is interested in a variety of critical approaches (chiefly philological, intertextual, narratological), 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 2007-8 academic year he is teaching a graduate seminar on Catullus (Classics 200, spring), the graduate proseminar (Classics 350, fall), an upper-level Latin course on Virgil's Aeneid (Latin 106b, fall), and a general education course in on the poetry and reception of Virgil (Literature and Arts A-51, fall). In the Harvard Extension School he is teaching two Latin courses, on Livy 1 (fall), and Catullus (spring).