Ian Fielding

Advisor, Graduate Certificate in Classical Reception Studies
Steering committee, Contexts for Classics

Research interests
My main research interests are in Latin poetry and its reception. Most of my publications to date have focused on the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries CE: my book, Transformations of Ovid in Late Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2017), is the first monograph study of Ovid's presence in this neglected period of literary history. The chapters crisscross the Mediterranean—from late Roman Gaul to Vandal Africa and Ostrogothic Italy, and from the Merovingian kingdoms to the imperial court at Constantinople—exploring how various Latin poets responded to the experiences of isolation from Rome that Ovid had described in his writings from exile on the shore of the Black Sea.

I am currently working on a new book, which will show how the satires of Juvenal have shaped ideas about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Arguably, Juvenal was more popular than any other author in Rome from the end of the fourth century; in another age when satire was all the rage, Juvenal's works were devoured by the historian Edward Gibbon, just a year before he conceived of writing his influential history of Rome's decline. Examining how Juvenal informed Gibbon's reading of his late antique sources, my book will draw attention to the role of this most insistently Roman poet in ancient and modern debates about the nature of Roman identity.

Teaching specialisms
As the advisor for the Graduate Certificate in Classical Reception Studies, I work with graduate students from various departments who are interested in the different encounters with Greco-Roman antiquity in later periods. The core seminar for this program is GREEK/LATIN 840/COMPLIT 750: Approaches to Classical Reception Studies, which I taught in W22.

I also have interests in women as readers and writers of Latin literature from antiquity to the early modern period, and taught a graduate seminar on Women Latin Poets (LATIN 870) in W21.

My undergraduate courses include a seminar on Ovid's Metamorphoses and its reception (CLCIV 480).

Fields of Interest

• Latin poetry, especially Ovid, Virgil, and Juvenal
• Classical receptions
• Women Latin writers

Select publications

• Transformations of Ovid in late antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
• 'The decadent prehistory of the Jeweled Style', in H. Kaufmann and J. Hartman (eds.), A late antique poetics? The Jeweled Style revisited (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2023).