David Wray

Associate Professor in the Department of Classics, the Department of Comparative Literature, and the College
Classics 28
Ph.D., Harvard University, 1996
Research Interests: Hellenistic and Roman poetry; literature and philosophy; reception; literary translation

David Wray is the author of Catullus and the Poetics of Roman Manhood (Cambridge 2001), a coeditor of Seneca and the Self (Cambridge 2009), and is currently writing Ovid at the Tragic Core of Modernity.  His research and teaching interests include Hellenistic and Roman poetry (especially Apollonius Rhodius, Catullus, Lucretius, Virgil, Tibullus, Ovid, Seneca, Lucan, and Statius); Greek epic and tragedy; Roman philosophy; ancient and modern relations between literature and philosophy; gender; theory and practice of literary translation; and the reception of Greco-Roman thought and literature, from Shakespeare and Corneille to Pound and Zukofsky.  He is a member of the Poetry and Poetics program.

Recent Publications

  • “Learned Poetry and the Classics: Three Case Studies,” in K. Haynes, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Classical Reception in English Literature, Vol. 5 (Oxford, 2019).
  • “Seneca’s Shame,” in S. Bartsch and A. Schiesaro, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Seneca (Cambridge, 2015), 199-211. 
  • “Quarreling over Homer in France and England, 1711-1715,” in G.W. Most and A. Schreyer, eds, Homer in Print:  A Catalogue of the Bibliotheca Homerica Langiana (Chicago, 2013), 300-331.
  • “Catullus the Roman Love Elegist?” in B. Gold, ed., Blackwell Companion to Roman Love Elegy (Malden MA, 2012).
  • (edited with Shadi Bartsch), Seneca and the Self (Cambridge, 2009).