Noted Classics Scholar to Lecture on Ciceronian Poetry
Katharina Volk
DELAWARE, Ohio – Ohio Wesleyan University’s Classics Club will host a free lecture Feb. 27 by Katharina Volk, Ph.D., associate professor of classics at Columbia University. Volk’s talk, the first in this semester’s series of classics lectures by visiting scholars, will consider “Cicero’s ‘De consulatu suo’ and the Latin Epic Tradition.”
Volk will speak at 4:15 p.m. Feb. 27 in Sturges Hall, 85 S. Sandusky St., Delaware. Her presentation will consider one of the great Roman orator and statesman Cicero’s least studied works, his epic poem “On His Consulship” of 63 B.C., the year in which the infamous conspiracy of Catiline threatened the stability of the Roman Republic. Volk will examine the influence of Cicero’s poem on later Latin narrative epics.
Volk holds a master’s degree from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich and a doctoral degree from Princeton University. She is the author of numerous studies on Latin and Greek literature, notably “The Poetics of Latin Didactic: Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, Manilius” (Oxford, 2002), “Manilius and His Intellectual Tradition” (Oxford, 2009), and, with Steven Green as co-editor, “Forgotten Stars: Rediscovering Manilius’ Astronomica” (Oxford, 2011). Her current research concerns the intellectual history of the first century B.C. at Rome.
For more information on Volk’s visit, contact Ohio Wesleyan assistant professor Caroline Stark, Ph.D., at cgstark@owu.edu or associate professor Lee Fratantuono, Ph.D., at lmfratan@owu.edu.
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