Brendon Reay

Brendon Reay is Assistant Professor of Classical Studies at Wellesley College. He joined the Wellesley faculty in 1998.

Professor Reay is a 1987 graduate of Reed College. He received his M.A. in Latin from Bryn Mawr College in 1993 and his Ph.D. in Classics from Stanford University in 1998. He was a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center during the academic year 1996-97, and received a Mabelle McLeod Lewis Dissertation Fellowship in 1997-98.

Professor Reay's primary research interests are the literature and culture of the Roman Republic and Empire, the period from roughly 200 B.C.E. to 200 C.E. His dissertation, Cultivating Romans: Republican Agricultural Writing and the Invention of the Agricola, explores the interrelationship of farming and ideas of "Romanness" in three texts from the 1st and 2nd centuries B.C.E.: Cato's De Agricultura, Varro's Res Rusticae and Virgil's Georgics. Professor Reay is currently preparing a book on farming and "Romanness." Articles on Virgil's Aeneid, Seneca's Medea, and the politics of canon formation in Greek rhetorical texts of the Roman imperial period are underway. Professor Reay has published books reviews in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review and the Stanford Humanities Review, and co-organized a conference, Institutionalizing the Classics, held at Stanford University in June, 1998.

Professor Reay's teaching responsibilities include courses in Greek, Latin, and Classical Civilization. In 1998-99, he is teaching beginning, intermediate, and advanced Latin as well as a class in-translation, Epic and Empire, that investigates the politics of epic poetry from Homer, Virgil, and Lucan to Milton, Whitman, and Walcott.

Profile last updated: 9/98