Gareth Williams
Anthon, Professor of Latin Language and Literature
Director of Graduate Studies, Classics
(212) 854-2850
gdw5@columbia.edu
615 Hamilton Hall
2024 Office hours: Mondays and Wednesdays, 1:30 p.m.–2:30 p.m., or by appointment.
Research Interests
Classical Latin poetry, especially elegy
Imperial Latin poetry, especially silver epic
Senecan philosophical prose
Renaissance humanism
Gareth Williams has taught at Columbia since 1992. He received a Ph.D. in 1990 from Cambridge University for a dissertation on Ovid’s exilic writings that subsequently resulted in two books, the first Banished Voices: Readings in Ovid’s Exile Poetry (Cambridge, 1994) and the second The Curse of Exile: A Study of Ovid’s Ibis, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society Supplementary Volume 19 (Cambridge, 1996).
Two distinct research phases followed, the first of which focused on the Latin ethical writings of Lucius Annaeus Seneca. Two monographs resulted, the first an edition with commentary of L. Annaeus Seneca: Selected Moral Dialogues. De Otio, De Brevitate Vitae (Cambridge, 2003); the second, The Cosmic Viewpoint: A Study of Seneca’s Natural Questions (Oxford, 2012), was awarded the Goodwin Award of Merit by the Society for Classical Studies in 2014. Most recently, among various other projects and edited volumes in the area of Roman philosophy, his research has focused on the socio-literary culture of Renaissance Venice, an interest that resulted in the publication of Pietro Bembo on Etna: The Ascent of a Venetian Humanist (Oxford, 2017).
A general book on Ovid has recently been published (On Ovid’s Metamorphoses, New York, 2023), and a two-volume edition and annotated translation of selected writings of the fifteenth-century Venetian humanist Ermolao Barbaro is currently in press with Bloomsbury (Ermolao Barbaro, On Celibacy and On the Duty of the Ambassador, London, 2023).
Selected Publications
Williams, G., & Barbaro, E. (2023). Ermolao Barbaro’s on celibacy 1 and 2. Bloomsbury Academic.
Barbaro, E., & Williams, G. D. (2023). Ermolao Barbaro’s on Celibacy 3 and 4 and on the duty of the ambassador. Bloomsbury Academic.
Seeing Seneca Whole: Perspectives on Philosophy, Poetry, and Politics (edited with Katharina Volk, Brill 2006).
The Cosmic Viewpoint: A Study of Seneca’s Natural Questions (Oxford 2012)
Roman Reflections: Essays on Latin Philosophy (edited with Katharina Volk, Oxford 2015).
Style and Form in Seneca’s Writings’, in S. Bartsch and A. Schiesaro, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Seneca (Cambridge, 2016), 135–149.
‘Lucan’s Civil War in Nero’s Rome’, in S. Bartsch. K. Freudenberg and C. Littlewood, eds., The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Nero (Cambridge, 2017), 93-106.
Pietro Bembo on Etna: The Ascent of a Venetian Humanist (Oxford 2017).
