Kirk Freudenburg

Kirk Freudenburg has taught at Yale since 2006.  Before coming to Yale he taught at Kent State University, Ohio State University and the University of Illinois. At Ohio State he was Associate Dean of the Humanities and at Illinois he was Chair of the Department of Classics. His research has long focused on the social life of Roman letters, especially on the unique cultural encodings that structure and inform Roman ideas of poetry, and the practical implementation of those ideas in specific poetic forms, especially satire.  His current work is focused primarily on Virgil’s Aeneid (see below).

 

His main publications include: The Walking Muse: Horace on the Theory of Satire (Princeton, 1993), Satires of Rome: Threatening Poses from Lucilius to Juvenal (Cambridge, 2001), the Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire (Cambridge, 2005), Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Horace’s Satires and Epistles (Oxford University Press, 2009), and the Cambridge Companion to the Age of Nero (Cambridge, 2017), co-edited with Shadi Bartsch and Cedric Littlewood. Horace Satires Book II, introduction, text, and commentary in the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics series (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

 

His most recent book, Virgil’s Cinematic Art: Vision as Narrative in the Aeneid (Oxford University Press, 2023) received the 2024 Alexander G. McKay Prize from the Vergilian Society, awarded at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Classical Studies in January 2025. An in-depth discussion of the book is featured on The Tel Podcast, hosted by Sebastian Wetherbee. His current project is a commentary on Aeneid 12 for a new commentary series on the Aeneid forthcoming from Lorenzo Valla (Mondadori), Milan.  His complete CV, along with a full list of downloadable articles, reviews, and op-eds, can be accessed via Academia.edu.