Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer works on Roman imperial literature, the history of rhetoric and philosophy, and on the reception of the western classical tradition in contemporary China. She is the author of 5 books on the ancient novel, Neronian literature, political theatricality, and Stoic philosophy, the most recent of which is Persius: A Study in Food, Philosophy, and the Figural (Winner of the 2016 Goodwin Award of Merit). She has also edited or co-edited 7 wide-ranging essay collections (two of them Cambridge Companions) and the “Seneca in Translation” series from the University of Chicago. Bartsch’s new translation of Vergil’s Aeneid was released from Random House in 2021; in 2022, she is publishing a monograph on the contemporary Chinese reception of ancient Greek political philosophy. Bartsch has been a Guggenheim fellow, edits the journal KNOW, and has held visiting scholar positions in St. Andrews, Taipei, and Rome. Starting in academic year 2015, she has led a university-wide initiative to explore the historical and social contexts in which knowledge is created, legitimized, and circulated.
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)