Latin Literature and Philosophy; Intellectual History
Katharina Volk has been teaching at Columbia since 2002. A Latinist specializing in the literature of the late Republic and early Empire, she has a particular interest in intellectual history and Roman philosophy.
Professor Volk is the author of The Poetics of Latin Didactic: Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, Manilius (Oxford 2002), Manilius and his Intellectual Background (Oxford 2009; recipient of the 2010 Lionel Trilling Book Award), and Ovid (Malden, MA 2010). Her many articles range in topic from Homeric formula and Aratean letter play to Ciceronian philosophy, Ovidian time, Senecan dramaturgy, and beyond. Her latest book, The Roman Republic of Letters: Scholarship, Philosophy, and Politics in the Age of Cicero and Caesar (Princeton 2021) explores the politics and sociology of knowledge in late Republican Rome, focusing on the intellectual activities of such learned senators as Cicero, Caesar, Varro, Nigidius Figulus, Cato, Brutus, and Cassius.
Professor Volk's current project is a commentary on Cicero's De amicitia for the Cambridge "green and yellow" series, which she is writing jointly with James Zetzel. Katharina Volk webpage.