Thomas is a doctoral candidate in the Classical Philology program. His dissertation project, Postimperial Classics, argues that modern and contemporary poetry and drama from the U.K. and Ireland ought to be read against the long history of Classics’ role in the British Empire. By reading certain texts “postimperially”, he makes the case that we can better appreciate the political stakes of contemporary classical reception with this history in mind. His interests in classical reception have also motivated multiple further projects, including the edited volumes American Classicisms (co-edited with Francesca Beretta) and Christopher Logue and the Classics (co-edited with Claire Barnes).
Along with Eleanor Martin, he organized the 2022-2023 Departmental Colloquium, Negotiating Empire: Reception/Resistance in Ancient and Modern Society, and most recently he co-organized the “Odysseus in the 21 st Century” panel at the Celtic Conference in Classics with colleagues from Harvard, Bryn Mawr, and the University of the Algarve.
He is also interested in Roman poetry and its relationship to Roman imperialism, starting with Catullus, although other works in progress include chapters on Vergil’s Eclogues, Ovid’s Heroides, and Suetonius’ De Grammaticis (an important source for the “neoterics”).
Thomas is committed to making the ancient world accessible in the classroom. He has completed the Poorvu Center’s Certificate of College Teaching Preparation and was awarded the Deborah Roberts Prize for Undergraduate teaching by the department in his first year as an instructor.
He can be contacted at thomas.munro@yale.edu.
Select Publications
Munro, T. A. L. (forthcoming 2027), “Property, Poverty, and the Neoteric Imaginary” in Rheinisches Museum für Philologie.
Munro, T. A. L. (forthcoming 2026), “Tellus Imbuta: An Ecocritical Reading of Catullus 64” in Helios 53.1.
Munro, T. A. L. (forthcoming 2025), “Fragmented Homers: Logue, Longley, Oswald” in Classical Receptions Journal 17.4.
Munro, T. A. L. (2025), “Dissociative Moments in Late Republican and Augustan Poetry” in H. Baumann and L. Schmeider eds. The Senses on Edge: Overstrained and Fading Senses in Antiquity (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag), 83-105.
Munro, T. A. L. (2024), “Catullus, Hesiod, and the Muses” in Classical Philology 119.1, 132-139.