Rachel Philbrick joined AMNE as Assistant Professor of Latin Literature in July 2024. After earning her PhD in Classics from Brown University in 2016, she held teaching positions at several U.S. universities, including Harvard, Georgetown, and Fordham. In 2019–2020, she taught in Rome, Italy, as Assistant Professor at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies. Her research interests lie in Latin literature of the republican and early imperial periods, particularly Latin elegy and epic.

Research Interests

• Latin Poetry, Especially Epic and Elegy
• Textual authority and credibility
• Genre and intertextuality
• Narratology
• Geography and Mapping, as Well as Narratives of Boundaries, Utopias, and the Unknown

Research Areas

• Greek (Language)
• Latin (Language)
• Roman Studies
• Greek Studies
• Literature

Projects

My research focuses on Latin poetry, particularly elegy and epic, with an eye always to the Greek tradition. Very broadly, I’m interested in literary technique, especially how written texts get their readers to believe them.

My current book project focuses on the poetry that Ovid (43 BCE – 17/18 CE) wrote from exile on the Black Sea coast. These works present the unusual case of a poet, who had spent his career exploiting poetry’s power to sound true without being true, suddenly desperate to be believed in a place—“Scythia”—that was the epitome of “barbarian” otherness in the Roman imagination. For 2,000 years, readers have reacted to Ovid’s account with skepticism. In this project, I’m studying the range of strategies that Ovid uses to give credibility to his account of an otherworldly place, and why these strategies have often had the opposite effect. Ultimately, these poems speak volumes about the blurry line between truth and fiction, as well as about the power and limits of literature.

I am also co-editing a volume of essays on the topic of manipulating time within the Roman world, which developed from a 2023 Celtic Conference in Classics panel. Time, as frequently conceived, is a force that cannot be stopped or significantly altered. This volume presents a diverse set of case studies of attempts, both mundane and cosmic, to exert influence over time, or at least our perception of it.

– “Latin Elegy” in The Oxford Handbook of Ennius (under contract, submitted)
– “Before Ibis: Invective Elegy in Tibullus.” Aevum Antiquum 21 (2021), 135–164.
– “Tibullus Beyond Elegy: Poetic Interference Across Generic Boundaries.” Aevum Antiquum 21 (2021), 3–13. (co-author: S. La Barbera)
– “The Literary Polemics of Anth. Pal. 11.275.” The Classical Quarterly 70:1 (2020), 261–267.
– “Coronis and the Metamorphosis of Apollo: Ovidian Re-formations of Pindar’s Third Pythian.” American Journal of Philology 139:3 (2018), 451–482.
– “Praeteritio and Cooperative Ambiguity.” In Quasi Labor Intus: Ambiguity in the Latin Language, edd. M. Fontaine, C. McNamara, and W. Short, 99–121. New York: The Paideia Institute, 2018.
– “Utopian Rome in Ovid’s Externalized View from Exile.” The Classical Outlook 91:2 (2016), 42–45.

I would be glad to work with graduate students who are interested in any literary, linguistic, or metrical aspects of Latin poetry, regardless of author or time period. My aim as an advisor is to help you sharpen your own research interests and to support you in setting and meeting big goals.