Dr Tom Geue

Biography

I’ve been lucky enough to learn and teach at some wonderful classical hotspots, and have been tattooed with the thoughts of many. I picked up a lot from Emily Matters at North Sydney Boys High School, and went further with Frances Muecke and Emma Gee for my undergraduate degree at the University of Sydney (2004-7). I waved off the sun to do an MPhil and PhD at King’s College, Cambridge, on the watch of John Henderson and Chris Whitton (2008-13). I then went west to be a stipendiary lecturer at Trinity College, Oxford (2013-14), and almost kissed the Severn Bore with a stint as a teaching fellow in Latin at the University of Bristol (2014-15). I’m overjoyed to stop traversing the island with a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at St Andrews (2015-18), followed by a lectureship in Latin (2018-into the sunset).

Research Interest

I’ve always been interested in (I’m currently telling myself I’ve always thought about) how literature ducks or dives into the political, and how that happens on the contested ground of the ‘self’. I’ve loitered in a few different corners of Latin literature along the way: from the oblique, allegorized politics of Horace's Ars Poetica, to the narratological alibi of the Roman calendar in Ovid’s Fasti, to the discourse of exile in Juvenal. I like to think in general about what it means to be an author under the Roman principate. My staple is the study of anonymous and pseudonymous texts, but I’m also stubbornly stumped by the question of how one writes a first-person self in ancient literature (and how one might do so in the age of electronic signature).