Shadi Bartsch

photo of Shadi Bartsch sitting in front of a bookshelf
Helen A. Regenstein Distinguished Service Professor of Classics; Director Emerita, The Institute on the Formation of Knowledge
sbartsch@uchicago.edu
Classics 26
Curriculum Vitae
Ph.D., UC Berkeley
Research Interests: Higher education and integrated research; the formation of knowledge; Roman imperial literature, philosophy, and culture; the classics in modern China

Shadi Bartsch is a scholar of the classics and of their reception in the modern world. She is also interested in the historical interaction of the sciences and humanities.

As founding Director of the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge from 2015-24, Bartsch oversaw a cross-divisional postdoctoral program, started the journal KNOW, established a new MA track and two new pedagogical initiatives (KNOW, XCAP), and brought faculty together for intellectual exchange from all the divisions of the University.

Bartsch has published works on ancient Rome, on rhetoric and philosophy, and on the reception of the western classical tradition in contemporary China, a challenge that involved learning Mandarin. Her book Persius: A Study in Food, Philosophy, and the Figural, won the 2016 Goodwin Award of Merit, and her translation of Vergil’s Aeneid was one of the Guardian’s notable books of the year. She has edited 7 wide-ranging essay collections (two of them Cambridge Companions) and the “Seneca in Translation” series from the University of Chicago. A Guggenheim fellow and member of the British Academy, she has held visiting scholar positions in St. Andrews, Taipei, and Rome. Her current book project is entitled Alchemies of Thought: Ten Essays on the Humanities and Scientific Innovation.

Recent Publications

  • Plato Goes to China: The Greek Classics and Chinese Nationalism. Princeton University Press.  2023.
  • The Rationality Wars:  The Ancient Greeks and the Counter-Enlightenment in Contemporary China. Forthcoming in a special issue of History and Theory.
  • The Aeneid.  A New Translation.  Random House. 2020.
  • “We Damn Your Memory,” on the destruction of historical statues, in Encyclopedia Britannica special issue with Madeleine Albright, Paul Krugman, Shirin Ebadi, et al. 2018.
  • Cambridge Companion to the Age of Nero, ed. with K. Freudenburg and C. Littlewood. Cambridge University Press. 2017.
  • Persius: A Study in Food, Philosophy, and the Figural. University of Chicago Press. 2015. (Winner of the 2016 Goodwin Award of Merit)
  • “The Metamorphosis of an Ass.” Review essay of Peter Singer, ed., and Ellen Finkelpearl, trans., Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. AJP 143. 2022.