Michèle Lowrie

Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Service Professor in Classics and in the College
Wieboldt 105B
Ph.D., Harvard University, 1990
Research Interests: Roman literature, culture, and political thought; Roman reception

Professor Lowrie’s research focuses on how Latin literature thinks about politics, particularly the ways political thought emerges from a text’s formal elements and figurative expression short of abstract conceptualization. She has published Horace’s Narrative Odes and Writing, Performance, and Authority in Augustan Rome, both from Oxford University Press. Edited volumes include Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Horace’s Odes and Epodes and, together with Susanne Lüdemann, Exemplarity and Singularity: Thinking through Particulars in Philosophy, Literature, and Law, with Routledge. Current research focuses on civil war and security, both Roman concepts with long histories. A frequent visitor to the Center for Advanced Studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, she has also held residential fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Warburg-Haus in Hamburg, the Research Center “Cultural Theory and Theory of the Political Imaginary” in Konstanz, the American Academy in Berlin, and the Institute of Advanced Study in Durham, England. She has received a Burkhardt Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, as well as fellowships from the Loeb Classical Library Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Professor Lowrie gave the Gray Lectures at Cambridge in 2018. Her BA is from Yale and PhD from Harvard.

Recent Publications

  • Civil War and the Collapse of the Social Bond: The Roman Tradition at the Heart of the Modern, co-authored with Barbara Vinken. Cambridge 2022.
  • Care and Security in Vergil’s Aeneid,” in Leah Tomkins (ed.), Paradoxes of Leadership and Care: Critical and Philosophical Reflections. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham 2020: 121-9.
  • “Security: calming the soul political in the wake of civil war,” in I. Kuin and J. Klooster (eds), After the Crisis: Remembrance, Re-anchoring and Recovery in Ancient Greece and Rome. Bloomsbury Academic, London 2020: 31-46.
  • “Figures of Discord and the Roman Addressee in Horace, Odes 3.6,” in S. J. Harrison, S. Frangoulides, and T. D. Papanghelis (eds), Intratextuality and Latin Literature. De Gruyter, Berlin 2018: 211-25.
  • “Roman Law and Latin Literature,” in Oxford Handbook of Roman Law and Society, eds. C. Ando, P. du Plessis, and K. Tuori. Oxford 2016: 70-82.