James Uden
James Uden is a specialist in Latin literature and its afterlife in later eras. He has written on a wide variety of authors and genres, including Catullus, Virgil, love elegy, and satire, and has a secondary interest in British and American Romanticism and the Gothic. Originally trained as a lawyer in his hometown of Sydney, Australia, he received his PhD in Classics from Columbia University (2011) and taught for fourteen years at Boston University before arriving as Professor of Classics at Yale in Fall 2025.
He is the author of two books: The Invisible Satirist: Juvenal and Second-Century Rome (Oxford, 2015) and Spectres of Antiquity: Classical Literature and the Gothic, 1740-1830 (Oxford, 2020). Spectres of Antiquity won the Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit from the Society of Classical Studies, and was a finalist for the Allan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prize.
Currently he has two projects in progress. The first book, tentatively entitled Heroic Vulnerability, examines representations of the wounded body in the epics of Virgil, Ovid, and Lucan. This work stems from a two-year period studying medical anthropology, funded by a New Directions grant from the Mellon Foundation. The second, entitled The Shadowboxer’s Speech, examines the world of ‘declamation’, a form of rhetorical roleplay that was part of Roman education. Rather than understanding declamation as a training in standard Roman norms, the book presents it as space for testing new ethical ideas and imagining alternate social possibilities.
Professor Uden enjoys working with students who share a love of ancient Roman literature, and are willing to test new approaches to old material. If you want to learn more, feel free to email him and strike up a conversation, or visit him in his office hours (Fall 2025: Tuesday 10-11am, Wednesday 10-noon).