Peter White

Herman C. Bernick Family Professor in Classics and the College
Classics 25D
Ph.D., Harvard University, 1972
Research Interests: Roman oratory, comedy, satire, epistolary collections, Augustine

Peter White has taught a wide range of Greek and Latin authors, from Herodotus to Menander, and from Plautus and Cicero to Augustine and Boethius.  He also regularly teaches in the Humanities Core.  In published work, he has explored the relationship between Roman social life and literary production, including social networks, book dedications, booksellers, and poetry contests. He has also published a study of Cicero’s letters and a Cambridge commentary on books 5-9 of Augustine’s Confessions.

Recent Publications

  • “Cicero and the Mirage of the Tirocinium Fori”, American Journal of Philology 144 (2023): 221-250
  • Augustine Confessions Books V-IX, Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, 2019).
  • “Senatorial Epistolography from Cicero to Sidonius: Emergence of a Genre”, in Epistolary Realities and Fictions: Essays on Roman Letters in Honor of Eleanor Winsor Leach, ed. T. Ramsby and A. Vasaly, Bulletin of the Institute for Classical Studies 61.2 (2018): 7-21.
  • Cicero in Letters: Epistolary Relations of the Late Republic (Oxford and New York, 2010).
  • “Bookshops in the Literary Culture of Rome,” in Ancient Literacies: The Culture of Reading in Greece and Rome, ed. W. A. Johnson and H. N. Parker (Oxford, 2009), pp. 268-287.