Lowell Bowditch
P. Lowell Bowditch is the current Department Head of Classics. She received her B.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley in 1984 and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Brown University in 1992. She has been at the University of Oregon since 1993 and has taught a wide range of language and literature courses on epic, tragedy, gender and sexuality in antiquity, and the Augustan era.
Professor Bowditch’s research focuses on the interface between the literature and socio-political relations of Augustan Rome. Currently, she is writing a book on love elegy and Roman imperialism. She is the author of Horace and the Gift Economy of Patronage (Los Angeles and Berkeley 2001) and of articles on Tibullus, Propertius, Horace, Ovid, and issues of translation. Recent publications include: “Horace and the Pyrrhatechnics of Translation,” Classical World,104.3 (2011) 355-62; “Tibullus and Egypt: A Postcolonial Reading of Elegy 1.7,” Arethusa, 44.1 (2011) 88-121; “Horace and Imperial Patronage,” in ed. Gregson Davis, Companion to Horace. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. (2010) 53-74; “Palatine Apollo and the Imperial Gaze: Propertius 2.31 and 2.32,” American Journal of Philology, vol. 130.3. (2009) 401-438.
Cristina G. Calhoon
A native of Italy, Dr. Calhoon holds a Laurea in English and German from the University of Torino and a PhD in Classics from the University of California, Irvine. She has taught a wide variety of language courses (Latin and Italian) at all levels, as well as courses on Roman women, Greeks and barbarians, classical mythology, and Roman culture.
Her research focuses on the relations between the classical world and other cultures, with an emphasis on Romans and northerners, and also on the cultural significance of women in Roman literature and politics. Her doctoral dissertation, Livia the Poisoner, dissects the intersection between the public image of the empress Livia and the sinister private activities attributed to her by political rivals, a theme further expanded in Dr. Calhoon’s ongoing study of poison and desire in Roman literature. The article «The Dynamics of Sacrifice in Livy 1.57-59» in Helios 24 examines Livy’s representation of Lucretia as the ritual scapegoat, while «the River, the City and the Forest», (in preparation) discusses the colonization of natural spaces on the Column of Trajan, the sculptural representation of the empire’s Heart of Darkness.
Christopher Eckerman
Professor Eckerman received his PhD in Classics from UCLA in 2007, his MA in Classics from UCLA in 2002, and his BA in Classics and Economics from UC Davis in 2000. While a graduate student, he was Virginia Grace Fellow at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens and a guest in the Philologisches Seminar in Tuebingen. He taught at UCLA for one year before coming to Eugene. At the University of Oregon, he teaches a broad range of courses, including Greek and Latin courses at all levels as well as classes in translation such as epic poetry and tragedy.
He has published some two dozen articles and book reviews on various aspects of Greek literature and society, primarily on Greek lyric poetry and ancient geography. Though his research has included Greek epigraphy and papyrology, his particular interests lie in epinician poetry, Panhellenic sanctuaries, and contemporary geographic theory. His research generally derives from interpreting Greek and Latin texts in ways that they have not been previously read, and thereafter teasing out the social, literary, and cultural repercussions of his readings. In addition to continuing to work on archaic Greek lyric, he plans to begin a book on imperial Greek epic poetry in the not too distant future.
