Carolyn Macdonald

Biography

Carolyn MacDonald joined the department of Classics and Ancient History in July of 2016 after a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of New Hampshire. She specializes in Latin literature and Roman art, and her interests include cross-cultural interaction and appropriation between Rome, Greece, and Italy; the invention and reinvention of Roman cultural memory; and the representation of the city and its monuments in Latin poetry and prose. Her doctoral work focused on visual and verbal responses to Roman displays of appropriated Greek art, which could simultaneously signify Rome’s geopolitical and economic clout, Roman cultural aspirations, and Greece’s unimpeachable artistic superiority. She is now expanding this research into a book, which will argue that looking at Greek art in Rome became a culturally loaded practice, through which viewers laid claim to various forms of identity and prestige. MacDonald is also currently co-editing an interdisciplinary volume on appropriation in Roman culture, tentatively titled City of Plunder: Roman Cargo Culture and the Dynamics of Appropriation. For her next book project, she plans to shift focus from Rome and Greece to Rome and Italy, to explore the submerged presence of Italic peoples in Roman legend and the cityscape itself. She has published and presented various papers on topics related to her research, including the reconfiguration of Roman topography in Varro and Propertius, the theme of appropriation in Martial’s ekphrastic epigrams, and the representation of Italy in Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica.

Research Interest

History