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Associate Professor of Comparative Literature
Associate Professor of Classical Studies

• Affiliation(s)

  • Comparative Literature, Classical Studies

• Fields of Study

  • Areas of research: Latin Literature
  • Roman Culture
  • Text and Image
  • Performance Studies
  • Classical Reception   Languages: Ancient Greek, Latin

• About

  Areas of research: Latin Literature; Roman Culture; Text and Image; Performance Studies; Classical Reception  
  Languages: Ancient Greek, Latin

  Basil Dufallo received the Ph.D. in Classics from UCLA in 1999 and has been teaching at the University of Michigan since 2001. He is the author of The Ghosts of the Past: Latin Literature, the Dead, and Rome’s Transition to a Principate (The Ohio State University Press, 2007) and The Captor’s Image: Greek Culture in Roman Ecphrasis (Oxford University Press, 2013) and has edited, with Peggy McCracken, Dead Lovers: Erotic Bonds and the Study of Premodern Europe (University of Michigan Press, 2006). Additional publications include articles on Latin literature and Roman culture. He is the recipient of a Faculty Fellowship at U-M’s Institute for the Humanities (2010-11) and is active in the American Philological Association. Ongoing projects include a book on cognitive error and authorial voice in Latin literature. Teaching interests in Classics include undergraduate courses on Roman civilization and undergraduate and graduate courses at all levels on Latin literature. Teaching interests in Comparative Literature include undergraduate courses on Text and Image as well as War and Homecoming and a graduate seminar on Language and Healing: Ancient and Modern Perspectives.

  Select Publications:

  • The Captor’s Image: Greek Culture in Roman Ecphrasis. Oxford University Press, 2013.
  • The Ghosts of the Past: Latin Literature, the Dead, and Rome’s Transition to a Principate. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2007.
  • Dead Lovers: Erotic Bonds and the Study of Premodern Europe, edited with Peggy McCracken.  Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006.
  • “Reception and Receptivity in Catullus 64,” Cultural Critique 74 (2010) 98-113, special volume on “Classical Reception and the Political,” ed. Miriam Leonard and Yopie Prins.
  • “Ecphrasis and Cultural Identification in Petronius’ Art Gallery,” Word & Image 23 (2007) 290-304.
  • “Propertius and the Blindness of Affect,” in Dead Lovers, ed. Dufallo and McCracken, 22-38.
  • “The Roman Elegist’s Dead Lover or The Drama of the Desiring Subject,” Phoenix 59 (2005) 112-20.
  • “Words Born and Made: Horace’s Defense of Neologisms and the Cultural Poetics of Latin,” Arethusa 38 (2005) 89-101.
  • “Propertian Elegy as ‘Restored Behavior’: Evoking Cynthia and Cornelia,” Helios 30.2 (2003) 163-79.

   

• Education

  • B.A., '92, Yale
  • Ph.D., '99, UCLA

• Selected Publications:

• Books

  • (2013) The Captor's Image: Greek Culture in Roman Ecphrasis