Patricia Rosenmeyer
George L. Paddison Professor of Classics
Ph.D., 1987, Princeton University
Patricia A. Rosenmeyer received her B.A. (1980) in Classics from Harvard University, having spent one semester abroad studying Greek at the Freie Universität Berlin (1977). She then took up a Marshall Scholarship at King’s College, Cambridge University, where she received a second B.A. (1982) and an M.A. (1987) in Classics. She earned her doctorate in Classics and Comparative Literature from Princeton University (1987). She began her career at the University of Michigan as an Assistant Professor of Classical Studies (1986-90), taught at Yale University (Assistant to Associate Professor, 1990-96) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Associate to Full Professor, 1997-2017), and then accepted the George L. Paddison Chair of Classics at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in the fall of 2017. Beginning in 2022, she began a term as Director of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies as the Levin Distinguished Term Professor, and currently divides her time equally between Classics and Jewish Studies.
Prof. Rosenmeyer admits to a wide range of scholarly interests: archaic Greek poetry; Helen of Troy; ancient Greek epistolary fiction; Hellenistic poetry; archaic, Hellenistic and imperial epigram; Ovid; imperial Greek literature; literary theory; Jewish Studies; and reception studies. She has published four books: The Politics of Imitation: Anacreon and the Anacreontic Tradition (Cambridge 1992), Ancient Epistolary Fictions: the Letter in Greek Literature (Cambridge 2001), Ancient Greek Literary Letters: Selections in Translation (Routledge 2016), and The Language of Ruins: Greek and Latin Inscriptions on the Memnon Colossus (Oxford 2018). With Owen Hodkinson, she co-edited a volume on epistolarity: Epistolary Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature (Brill 2013), and is about to publish a co-edited volume with Vered Lev Kenaan on Classical Transformations in Jewish, Israeli, and Palestinian Receptions (Oxford 2024). Her articles include work on Homer, Sappho, Anacreon, the Anacreontics, Callimachus, Meleager, Plautus, Ovid, Petronius, and Aristaenetus, as well as the reception of Classical literature by English, French, German, early 20th-century Greek, and Hebrew authors. Her entry on “Greek Literary Letters” recently appeared online for Oxford Bibliographies in Classics (2017/rev. 2023). For her scholarship, she has received fellowships from AAUW (1986), ACLS (1988-89), NEH (1992-93; 2000), the Mellon Foundation (2007-08), and the Loeb Classical Library Foundation (2010). She has been a Visiting Fellow at the Pembroke Center for Teaching & Research on Women at Brown (1990-91), the Institute for Research in the Humanities at UW-Madison (1998), and Clare Hall, Cambridge (2017). She is a 2020-2021 recipient of the Dorothy Tarrant Fellowship at the Institute for Classical Studies in London. Her current research project is an elementary commentary on Sappho for undergraduate readers, and translation as cultural strategy in early 20th-century western Europe, including Hebrew and Yiddish translations of Greek archaic lyric and epic.
In terms of service to the profession, Prof. Rosenmeyer has served in offices for the SCS (including the Goodwin Committee), acted as a reader for university presses (Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, Princeton, Routledge, Wisconsin) and journals (Amphora, AJP, Arethusa, CA, CJ, CP, CW, TAPA, Sound Studies), served on selection committees for ACLS and NEH and participated in external tenure reviews in the US and abroad. In addition to 2 Ph.D. dissertations at Yale, she directed 14 Ph.D. dissertations and 8 M.A. theses at Wisconsin during her years there, as well as serving on numerous committees. She welcomes students at UNC-Chapel Hill, both undergraduate and graduate, to work with her on projects related to any of her areas of interest.
Email: patanneATemailDOTuncDOTedu