John Bodel
W. Duncan MacMillan II Professor of Classics and Professor of History, Chair of Classics:
Macfarlane House 204
Phone: 401-863-3815
Phone 2: 401-863-1267
John_Bodel@brown.edu
John Bodel is mainly interested in Roman social, cultural, and economic history and in Latin literature of the early Empire. Much of his research involves Roman inscriptions in one way or another, and he has a general interest in ancient funerals and burial customs, Roman religion, ancient slavery, and the editing of Latin texts. He directs the U.S. Epigraphy Project and since 2001 has been involved with the EpiDoc team in developing a set of conventions for editing inscriptions digitally in XML.
Biography
Educated at Princeton (B.A. 1978) and the University of Michigan (Ph.D. 1984), Bodel taught at Harvard (1984-1992), and Rutgers (1993-2002) before joining the faculty at Brown in 2003. He was a Resident at the American Academy in Rome in 2006 and has held appointments as Visiting Professor at Berkeley (2000), Princeton (2002), and Oxford (2004). Since 1995 he has directed the U.S. Epigraphy Project, the purpose of which is to gather and share information about ancient Greek and Latin inscriptions preserved in the United States.
Interests
His interests center on Roman cultural, social, and religious history, Latin epigraphy, and Greek and Latin literature of the early empire. Recent and forthcoming projects concern Roman tomb gardens, collective burial at Rome during the first three centuries CE, Roman household religion, and slave labor in Roman society.
His current work-in-progress focuses on Roman funerary culture, ex-voto and other religious dedications, 'paragrams' in Italic and old Roman scripts, the development of the cultural idea of the villa during the later Roman Republic, and Tacitus as an historian. Future aspirations include writing a long essay on the arrangement and publication of Pliny's letters, a short book on Petronius, and somewhat more ambitious study of the Roman funeral.
At the U.S. Epigraphy Project Bodel oversees development of an XML-based search engine and photographic archive of the 3,500 ancient Greek and Latin inscriptions cataloged in the online database and participates with an international team of epigraphists in developing a set of guidelines and semantic markup tools for the editing and publication of inscriptions in digital form (EpiDoc).
Degrees
B.A, Classics, Princeton University, 1978, M.A., Classical Philology, University of Michigan, 1979, Ph.D., Classical Philology, University of Michigan, 1984
Awards
Lucy Shoe Meritt Resident in Ancient Studies, American Academy in Rome, spring 2006
National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship, 1993
Fellow, American Academy in Rome, 1983
Affiliations
American Philological Association
Archaeological Institute of America
American Academy in Rome
American Society of Greek and Latin Epigraphy
Association Internationale d'Epigraphie Grecque et Latine
Teaching
Bodel teaches undergraduate courses in Latin language and literature, Roman history and religion, ancient slavery, and Pompeii, and graduate seminars on Latin epigraphy, the social configuration of space at Pompeii, "The Book" (on the sociology of reading and the influence of ancient publication practices on Roman literary forms), and on his favorite Latin authors: Apuleius, Petronius, Pliny, Tacitus, and Varro.
Funded Research
1993
National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship for University Teachers, "The Business of Death in the Roman World" ($30,000)
1994-2002
"The U.S. Epigraphy Project," Rutgers University, Research Council ($10,000 per annum)
1996, 1997
Magie Publications Fund Committee, Princeton University ($3,000)
2004-2005
Scholarly Technology Group Faculty Grant, Brown University ($30,000)
2008-2009
Salomon Faculty Research Award, Brown University ($19,000)
