Ben Davis

Ben Davis (they/them or he/him) graduated with a B.A. in Linguistics and Classics (summa cum laude) from the University of Utah in 2016 and received their M.A. in Classical Languages and Literature from the University of Oregon in 2018, with a second M.A. in Classics from UCLA in 2021. Their interests span both Latin literature and Roman social history and material culture. Onthe literary side, they are interested in the Latin pastoral and epic poetry of the Imperial period, including Lucan, Statius, and Calpurnius Siculus, with a strong focus on these poets’ representation of landscape and its relationship to the violence and imperialism depicted in (or conspicuously omitted from) their texts. They are also interested in the reception of the lives and writings of Vergil, Ovid, and Cicero in the Imperial declamatory schools and the poets and writers they produced. On the social history and material culture side, Ben is interested in the Romans’ relationship with the rural landscape and the way that class dynamics play out in non-metropolitan Italy and the Western provinces, with villas as a key site of elite self-fashioning and embedded violence. Other, secondary fields of interest include Latin pastoral in Late Antiquity and early Christian reception of Vergil, queer readings of pastoral, and landscape ecphrasis in tragedy and lyric (both Greek and Latin).