Luke Roman’s areas of research include Latin literature, Renaissance humanism, representations of the city of Rome, monuments and monumentality, ideas of place and space, the materiality of books and writing, the classical tradition, and the global discipline of Classics. His monograph Poetic Autonomy in Ancient Rome (Oxford University Press, 2014), examines the rhetoric of autonomy in Roman first-person poetry from the late republic to the early empire. Another major focus of his research is Renaissance Latin literature. In 2011-2012, as a fellow at the Villa I Tatti in Florence (The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies), he studied the elegiac works of the Neapolitan humanist Giovanni Pontano. He has produced two volumes of Pontano’s works for the I Tatti Renaissance Library Series (Harvard University Press), with introductions, translations, and notes: Giovanni Gioviano Pontano: On Married Love; Eridanus(2014); Giovanni Gioviano Pontano: Eclogues; Garden of the Hesperides (2023). His current research project, supported by a SSHRC Insight Grant (2017-2022), Humanist Topographies: the classical poetics of place in Renaissance Italy, traces the shifting significance of classical places in the works of Italian humanists based in Florence, Rome, and Naples (ca. 1450-1530). He is currently part of a team preparing a three-volume edition of George Herbert's complete works. He is also collaborating with classicists in Nigeria and Ghana in exploring the discipline of Classics in a global perspective. In May 2019, he organized an international conference on Classical Antiquity and Local Identities: from Newfoundland to Nigeria and Ghana at Memorial University (supported by a SSHRC Connection Grant). 

Luke Roman’s teaching interests include classical and post-classical Latin language and literature, ancient Greek language and literature, Roman history and civilization, Renaissance humanism, post-colonial classical receptions, and the city of Rome. In 2007-2008, he taught at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome. 

Academics

PhD, 1999, Stanford University

Visiting Student, 1996-7, New College, Oxford

BA, 1994, Harvard University

Selected Recent Publications 

Under contract. Whalen, Robert, Christopher Hodgkins, Paul Davis, and Luke Roman, with translations by Sarah Kunjummen and the editors. George Herbert: Complete Works. 3 volumes. Oxford: University Press.

Forthcoming. “‘To gaze in wonder on the orange tree’: nature, landscape, and art in Giovanni Pontano’s De hortis Hesperidum.” In Anatole Tchikine (ed.), Creating a “Third Nature:” Gardens and Constructions of Landscape in the Italian Renaissance. Brepols.

Forthcoming. "Celebrity Authors in Ancient Rome." In The Cultural History of Fame, Volume 1: Antiquity. Volume editor: Charles Hedrick. General editor: P. David Marshall. Bloomsbury.

2023. “Poliziano’s (commentary on Statius’) Silvae: Between Imitation and Exegesis.” In Anna Loio (ed.), Editing and Commenting on Statius’ Silvae (Leiden, Boston: Brill), 48-85.

2023. Robert Whalen and Luke Roman, “Neglected Witnesses to George Herbert's Musæ Responsoriæ.” Studies in Philology 120.2: 247-283

2023. “Virgil’s Renaissance rebirth: genre and geography in Pontano Eridanus 1.14.” In Alison Keith and Micah Myers (eds.), Virgil and Elegy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 351-68.

2022. Giovanni Gioviano Pontano: Eclogues; Garden of the Hesperides. I Tatti Renaissance Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.

2022. “Coryciana: The Spaces of the Collection.” In Myron McShane and John Nassichuk, ed., ‘Hi cursus fecere novos ...’: Studies in Latin Humanism, a special issue of Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme 45.3: 103-40.

2020. "Flavian Rome in Humanist Florence." In Damien Nelis, Lorenz Baumer and Manuel Royo (ed.), Rome à l'époque flavienne: entre espace littéraire et topographie réelle (Bordeaux: Éditions Ausonius), 205-225.

Selected Recent Presentations

2023. "Nenia: a popular song-genre and its reception in fifteenth-century Naples," Celtic Conference in Classics, Coimbra Portugal

2023. “The poetics of simulation in Martial’s Epigrams: objects, substances, places.” La force de la copie, Université de Geneve, Switzerland.

2022. "The Unsafe Road: Travels of the Greek Classics in Femi Osofisan," Global Classics and Africa, Legon, Ghana.

2021. “Farewell to a Place: Writing Sannazaro’s End.” Annual Meeting of the Classical Association of Canada (online).

2021. “Coryciana: The Spaces of the Collection.” Conference of the Canadian Association of Neo-Latin Studies (online; CRRS, Toronto).

2019. “Celebrity Authors in Ancient Rome.” Annual Meeting of the Atlantic Classical Association, St. John’s, Canada.

2019. "Greco-Roman Voyages: The Mobility of the Classics." The Seventh Biennial Constantine Leventis Memorial Lecture, Department of Classics, University of Ibadan, Nigeria.