Basil Dufallo

Areas of research: Latin Literature; Roman Culture; Queer Theory; Postcolonial Theory; New Materialisms; Text and Image; Classical Reception  

Basil Dufallo received the Ph.D. in Classics from UCLA in 1999 and has been teaching at the University of Michigan since 2001. He is the author of Disorienting Empire: Republican Latin Poetry's Wanderers (Oxford University Press, 2021), The Captor’s Image: Greek Culture in Roman Ecphrasis (Oxford University Press, 2013), and The Ghosts of the Past: Latin Literature, the Dead, and Rome’s Transition to a Principate (The Ohio State University Press, 2007) and has edited Roman Error: Classical Reception and the Problem of Rome's Flaws (Oxford University Press, 2018) as well as, with Riemer Faber, Comparing Roman Hellenisms in Italy (University of Michigan Press, 2023) and, with Peggy McCracken, Dead Lovers: Erotic Bonds and the Study of Premodern Europe (University of Michigan Press, 2006). Additional publications include articles and book chapters on Latin literature, Roman culture, and their modern reception. He is the recipient of a Visiting International Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick (2018) and a Faculty Fellowship at U-M’s Institute for the Humanities (2010-11) and is active in the Society for Classical Studies and the Classical Association of the Middle West and South. Ongoing projects include a book on Hercules in Imperial Latin poetry and an introductory guide to Virgil's Aeneid for the Core Knowledge series at Columbia University Press. Teaching interests include undergraduate courses on Greek and Roman civilization and Great Books and undergraduate and graduate courses at all levels on Latin literature. 

Select Publications:

• Disorienting Empire: Republican Latin Poetry's Wanderers. Oxford University Press, 2021. Link to OUP informational page.

• The Captor’s Image: Greek Culture in Roman Ecphrasis. Oxford University Press, 2013. Link to OUP informational page.

• The Ghosts of the Past: Latin Literature, the Dead, and Rome’s Transition to a Principate. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2007. Link to OSU Press informational page.

• Ed., Roman Error: Classical Reception and the Problem of Rome's Flaws. Classical Presences. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

• Ed. with Peggy McCracken, Dead Lovers: Erotic Bonds and the Study of Premodern Europe. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006.

• “ekphrasis in Latin Literature.” In The Oxford Classical Dictionary. Revised and Expanded Online Edition. Oxford University Press. Article published February 2020. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199381135.013.8138.

• “The Comedy of Plunder: Art and Appropriation in Plautus’s Menaechmi,” in Matthew P. Loar, Carolyn MacDonald, and Dan-el Padilla Peralta, eds., Rome, Empire of Plunder: The Dynamics of Cultural Appropriation, 15-29 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

• "Publicizing Political Authority in Horace's Satires, Book 1: The Sacral and the Demystified," Classical Philology 110 (2015) 313-32.

• “Reception and Receptivity in Catullus 64,” Cultural Critique 74 (2010) 98-113, special volume on “Classical Reception and the Political,” ed. Miriam Leonard and Yopie Prins.

• “Ecphrasis and Cultural Identification in Petronius’ Art Gallery,” Word & Image 23 (2007) 290-304.

• “Propertius and the Blindness of Affect,” in Dead Lovers, ed. Dufallo and McCracken, 22-38.

• “The Roman Elegist’s Dead Lover or The Drama of the Desiring Subject,” Phoenix 59 (2005) 112-20.

• “Words Born and Made: Horace’s Defense of Neologisms and the Cultural Poetics of Latin,” Arethusa 38 (2005) 89-101.
• “Propertian Elegy as ‘Restored Behavior’: Evoking Cynthia and Cornelia,” Helios 30.2 (2003) 163-79.

Affiliation(s)

• Classical Studies
• Comparative Literature