Liz Young

I was lucky enough to read Apuleius, Horace and Vergil in high school and I have been smitten with Latin literature ever since. I majored in Classics at college and went on to receive my PhD in Comparative Literature, writing a dissertation on lyric translation that focused on the work and reception of Catullus.

Perhaps the best way to sum up my intellectual interests is to say that I am a poetry aficionada who is drawn both to the very old and the very new and explores the forces of recollection, appropriation, and transformation that connect the two. My research focuses primarily on Latin poetry and its afterlife, encompassing cultural studies, genre theory, reception and translation. I have published on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and presented papers on topics including Sapphic fragmentation, Ariadne as an oratorical heroine, and Virgilian miniaturization as a proto-Romantic sublime.

A book of my own poems titled Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize is due out in the Spring of 2009. These poems are resolutely modern (some might even say post-postmodern) but they do feature cameos from a cast of Greek and Roman characters ranging from Gaia, Cleopatra and Vesta to the shade of Ajax and Antigonus the One-Eyed.