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Maria Wyke - Full CV

University Record

Research Interests and History

Latin Studies

My research interests commenced with study of Roman women, Latin love poetry and gender. This led to a series of articles published in both British and American journals or edited collections. They were updated and added to in The Roman Mistress: Ancient and Modern Representations (2002). The book also included new essays on the history and reception of Messalina.

I have also edited or co-edited three collections of essays on gender in the ancient Mediterranean and one on Roman bodies and their reception: Women in Ancient Societies: An Illusion of the Night (1994), Gender and the Body in the Ancient Mediterranean (1998), Parchments of Gender: Deciphering the Bodies of Antiquity (1998), and Roman Bodies: from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (2005).

Along with Luke Houghton ( University of Glasgow), I have edited a collection of papers which derive from a conference we held at UCL in summer 2007 - Perceptions of Horace: A Roman Poet and His Readers (CUP, 2009). My interest and involvement in Latin studies at UCL continues with further papers, undergraduate and graduate teaching, supervision of research students, and examination of PhD theses , and the organisation of conferences.


Reception Studies

From 1990, I began research into the representation of Roman history in American and Italian cinema, published as Projecting the Past: Ancient Rome, Cinema and History (1997). Since then, I became interested in the reception of antiquity more broadly. I ran an interdisciplinary research seminar at the University of Reading whose papers were published as The Uses and Abuses of Antiquity (1999), and with Andrew Hopkins, coedited a volume of essays entitled Roman Bodies (2005).

Thanks to a Major Leverhulme Research Fellowship, I then began a new study of the reception of Julius Caesar. Collected papers from a conference on the subject were published as Julius Caesar in Western Culture (2005). I produced a monograph on the dictator's rich afterlife in western culture, Caesar: A Life in Western Culture (2007) and, as the third and final work in that series, a study of Julius Caesar's place in modern American culture, Caesar in the USA (2012).

I am editor for Blackwell of a new series on the reception of antiquity. Ten volumes are currently under contract or being solicited on areas of reception such as architecture, art history, antiquity and modernity, epic, tragedy, sexuality, myth, and political science.

Ancient Civilizations in Silent Cinema

In the last few years, I have returned to the study of early film, collaborating with Pantelis Michelakis on editing a collection of essays, Antiquity in Silent Cinema (2013) that attempt to set the agenda and research directions for a new large-scale study of ancient civilizations in silent cinema, thus enhancing understanding of cinema's fascination with the past and of the appeal of ancient civilizations in modernity.

Research Awards and Grants

• Charles Oldham Travelling Scholarship ( University of Oxford)
• Awards from the Jebb Fund ( University of Cambridge)
• The Edith Haynes Scholar ( Somerville College, Oxford)
• Alice Horsman Travelling Fellowship ( Somerville College, Oxford)
• Visiting Scholar in Department of Classics, University of Southern California at Los Angeles (January-March)
• Wingate Foundation Scholar for three consecutive years, 1990-1993
• Awards from the British Academy, the British School at Rome, Somerville College and the Wingate Foundation to support research for a book on the ancient world and cinema entitled Projecting the past: ancient Rome, cinema and history (1997)
• 1997-1998 Balsdon Fellow at the British School at Rome
• Award from the British Academy to support initial archival survey on Julius Caesar in Popular Culture. 1999-2000
• 2000: AHRB Research Leave award to complete book of essays on The Roman Mistress: Ancient and Modern Representations (2002), and British Academy Research Grant towards research and publication costs
• 2000-2003: Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to research Julius Caesar in western culture
• 2005-8: UCL post-doctoral fellowship to assist development of research and postgraduate teaching in the areas of Latin and Reception Studies
• 2006/7: AHRB Research Leave award to complete two books Caesar: A Life in Western Culture (2007) and Caesar in the USA: Popular Culture, Classical Reception, American Identity (publication c. 2009).
• 2007: British Academy grant to support a conference at UCL on Horace
• 2008-9: UCL Futures grant to exhibit silent films set in the ancient world at the Bloomsbury Theatre, London
• 2009-10: British Academy grant to visit film archives in Europe and the USA.

Publications

Monographs

• The Roman Mistress: Ancient and Modern Representations (OUP, 2002), 452pp
• Projecting the Past: ancient Rome, cinema and history, published by Routledge in the New Ancient World series (1997), 237pp. [Introduction reprinted in The Historical Film: History and Memory in the Media, ed. Marcia Landy ( New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000), pp. 125-42.]
• Caesar: A Life in Western Culture (Granta, 2007; University of Chicago Press, 2008)
• Caesar in the USA (University of California Press, 2012)

Edited Collections

• co-editor with Pantelis Michelakis of Antiquity in Silent Cinema (CUP, 2013)
• co-editor with Luke Houghton of Perceptions of Horace: A Roman Poet and his Readers (CUP, 2009)
• editor of Julius Caesar in Western Culture (Blackwell, 2006)
• co-editor with Andrew Hopkins of Roman Bodies: From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (BRS, 2005)
• co-editor with Michael Biddiss of The Uses and Abuses of Antiquity, with Professor Michael Biddiss (Peter Lang, 1999)
• editor of Parchments of Gender: Deciphering the Bodies of Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 1998)
• editor of Gender and the Body in the Ancient Mediterranean (Blackwell, 1998)
• co-editor of An Illusion of the Night: Women in Ancient Societies, with Leonie Archer and Susan Fischler (Macmillan Press, 1994)

Articles

• 'How to like the Gallic War: Julius Caesar and an American education', in Julio Cesar: Textos, Contextos, Recepcion. De la Roma Classica al mundo actual (2009), pp.509-28.
• 'Film style and Fascism: Julius Caesar (1953)', Film Studies (2004)
• 'Are you not entertained?: Classicists and Cinema', in International Journal of the Classical Tradition 9.3 (2003), pp.430-45.
• With Dominic Montserrat, 'Glamour Girls: Cleomania in Mass Culture' in a volume on Cleopatra and Egyptomania, ed. Margaret Miles for John Hopkins University Press (for University of California Press, 2005/6)
• With Sandra Joshel and Margaret Malamud, 'Imperial Projections', introduction to Imperial Projections: Ancient Rome in Modern Popular Culture, eds. S. R. Joshel, M. Malamud, and D. McGuire (John Hopkins University Press, 2001), pp. 1-22
• 'Shared Sexualities: Roman Soldiers, Derek Jarman's Sebastiane and British Homosexuality', in Imperial Projections (a substantially revised version of article cited below), pp. 229-248
• 'Ancient Rome and the traditions of film history', Screening the past Issue 6 1999. Uploaded 16 April 1999, www.latrobe.edu.au/www/screeningthepast/firstleave /fr0499/mwfr6b.htm
• 'Sawdust Caesar: Mussolini, Julius Caesar, and the drama of dictatorship', in Uses and Abuses of Antiquity, eds. Maria Wyke and Michael Biddiss (Peter Lang, 1999), pp. 167-86
• 'Screening ancient Rome in the new Italy', in Roman Presences: Receptions of Rome in European Culture, (1789-1945), ed. C. Edwards (CUP, 1999), pp. 188-204
• 'Playing Roman Soldiers: the martyred body, Derek Jarman's Sebastiane and the representation of male homosexuality', in Parchments of Gender: Deciphering the Bodies of Antiquity ed. Maria Wyke (OUP, 1998), pp. 243-66
• 'Classics and Contempt: redeeming cinema for the classical tradition', in Arion 6.1 (1998), pp.124-136
• 'Herculean Muscle!: the classicizing rhetoric of bodybuilding' in Arion 4.3 (1997), pp. 51-79, and in Constructions of the Classical Body, ed. J. Porter, (University of Michigan, 1999)
• 'Cinema and the City of the Dead: representations of Pompeii on film', in New scholarship from BFI research, (eds.) Duncan Petrie and Colin MacCabe, (BFI 1996), pp. 140-156
• 'Learning to Look', Museums Journal 93.10 (1993), pp.18-19
• 'Taking the woman's part: engendering Roman love elegy', in Roman Literature and Ideology, Ramus essays for J.P. Sullivan, (ed.) A. J. Boyle, (1995, Bendigo Press), pp.110-128
• 'Make like Nero! The appeal of a cinematic emperor' in Reflections of Nero: culture, history and representation (eds.) Jas Elsner and Jamie Masters (1994, Duckworth), pp.11-28
• 'Woman in the Mirror: The Rhetoric of Adornment in the Roman World' in Women in Ancient Societies: An Illusion of the Night (eds.) L. Archer, S. Fischler and M. Wyke, (1994, Macmillan Press), pp. 134-151
• 'Augustan Cleopatras: female power and poetic authority' in Roman poetry and propaganda in the age of Augustus ed. Anton Powell, (1992, Bristol Classical Press) pp. 98-104
• 'In pursuit of love, the poetic self and a process of reading: Augustan elegy in the 1980s' in Journal of Roman Studies (1989) 79, pp.165-173
• 'Mistress and metaphor in Augustan elegy' in Helios 16.1, (1989) pp.25-47. [Reprinted in Sexuality and Gender in the Classical World: Readings and Sources, ed. Laura McClure ( Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 193-219; and in Latin Erotic Elegy: An Anthology and Reader, ed Paul Allen Miller ( London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 386-409.]
• 'Reading female flesh: Amores 3.1' in History as text ed. Averil Cameron, Duckworth, (1989) pp.111-143
• 'The Elegiac Woman at Rome' in Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society (1987) NS 33, pp.153-178
• 'Written women: Propertius' scripta puella' in Journal of Roman Studies (1987) 77, pp.47-61

Projects in progress

• series editor of Classical Receptions (Blackwell)

Projects planned

• long-term collaborative study of ancient civilizations in silent cinema

back to M. Wyke's homepage