Sharon L. James received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, with a dissertation on parents and children in the Iliad, the Aeneid, and the Divine Comedy.
Her areas of scholarly specialization are Latin poetry; women and gender in antiquity, particularly women in Rome; New Comedy; and Italian epic. Further areas of interest include new approaches to classics, including feminism and literary theory; gender in Greek tragedy; family and social organization in Homer; the Renaissance Italian New Comedy of Machiavelli and Ariosto.
Her teaching interests range from Latin of all kinds and all levels to comparative literature courses; she regularly teaches lecture courses on women in ancient Greece and women in ancient Rome. On the undergraduate level, she offers Latin courses on Horace and Catullus, Roman elegy, Roman Comedy, and Vergil, and Latin and Greek lyric poetry in translation, a range of first-year seminars; and a grammar review for classics students. Her regular graduate courses include Ovid and Literary Theory, Roman Comedy, Roman Elegy, the Augustan Survey, and an intensive interdisciplinary graduate course, "Approaches to Women in Antiquity," team-taught with Professor Sheila Dillon (Department of Art History, Duke University).
She has published articles on Vergil, Ovid, Roman comedy, and elegy, and she edited volume 25.1 of Helios, on "Constructions of Gender and Genre in Roman Comedy and Elegy." An article entitled "Women Reading Men: On the Fictive Female Audience of the Ars Amatoria" appeared in Cambridge Classical Journal (=PCPhS) vol. 54 (2008), and another, "Ipsa Dixerat: Women’s Words in Roman Love Elegy," is forthcoming in Phoenix. "Feminist Pedagogy and Teaching Latin Literature" was published in Cloelia 38 (2008); it was awarded a prize from the Women’s Classical Caucus for Special Contribution to Feminist Pedagogy. She contributed the entries on women in ancient Greece and women in Greek literature to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome. Several articles are drafted and in preparation, on Pasicompsa in Plautus’ Mercator, rape in Menander, Arethusa in Propertius 4.3, and female speech in Roman Comedy (an expansion of her paper for the 2005 APA special seminar on the gender of Latin). For Blackwell’s Companion to Elegy, she is writing articles entitled "Elegy and Roman Comedy" and "Teaching Rape in Roman Elegy. " She is also writing an article on gender and sexuality in Terence, for Blackwell’s Companion to Terence.
Her book, Learned Girls and Male Persuasion: Gender and Reading in Roman Love Elegy (University of California Press, 2003), examines the arguments of Roman elegy from the perspective of its preferred love object, the docta puella. With Professor Sheila Dillon, she is co-editing Blackwell’s Companion to Women in the Ancient World, and with Professor Dorota Dutsch of UC Santa Barbara, she is co-editing a volume entitled Women in Roman Drama.
Her current book project, a large-scale study entitled Women in Greek and Roman New Comedy, is well under way. Future research projects include studies of the captive female and the mythic hero's fertility in Homer and Vergil, an undergraduate commentary on Ovid'’s Ars amatoria, and a long-postponed study of the Anglo-American reception, in the 19th and 20th centuries, of Euripides’ Alcestis. More distant projects will take on the construction of woman in historical prose sources from the late Republic to the early Empire, Tacitus and the Vergilian lexicon of melancholy, and the exploitation of power in Ovid's Metamorphoses. At some point she will revise for publication a collection of eight Roman comedies she has translated for teaching.
She taught at Hamilton College, Bryn Mawr College, and the University of California, Santa Cruz before coming to UNC Chapel Hill in 1999.
E-mail: sljames@email.unc.edu
Curriculum Vitae
