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Brian Walters

Profile picture for Brian Walters

Contact Information

4051 Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics Building
707 S Mathews Ave
Urbana, IL 61801

Office Hours

by appointment
Associate Professor

Biography

Brian Walters (B.A. University of Missouri 1998, M.A. University of Kansas 2003, Ph.D UCLA 2011) is Associate Professor of the Classics and Translation Studies. His research focuses on Latin of all periods, but with particular emphasis on Cicero and the literature of the late republic.

Research Interests

Latin Literature, Cicero and the Late Republic, Classical Reception

Research Description

Professor Walters works on Latin literature, with an emphasis on Cicero and the literature of the late republic and early empire. His recent book, The Deaths of the Republic: Imagery of the Body Politic in Ciceronian Rome (Oxford, 2020), examined depictions of the state as a body in republican political discourse of the first century BCE, exploring their resonances and the ways they were implicated in the politics of the period. He has also written on Ciceronian oratory and authorship, Latin metaphor (especially disintegration and disease), and poetics, and has translated Lucan's Civil War (Hackett, 2015) and a variety of other poetic works (see, e.g. Arion 25.1 and 25.3) for publication. 

He is currently working on a book on Cicero's poetry and trying to complete translations of Virgil's Georgics and Lucretius' The Nature of Things.

When not teaching Latin, he frequently offers courses on Neronian Life and Literature, Roman Civilization, and Roman Material Culture.

Additional Campus Affiliations

Associate Professor, Classics
Associate Professor, Program in Translation and Interpreting Studies

Recent Publications

Walters, B. (2020). The Deaths of the Republic: Imagery of the Body Politic in Ciceronian Rome. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198839576.001.0001

Walters, B. (2019). Sulla's Phthiriasis and the Republican Body Politic. Mnemosyne, 72(6), 949-971. https://doi.org/10.1163/1568525X-12342610

Lucretius, & Walters, B. C., (TRANS.) (2018). A Prayer for Peace. Arion - Journal of Humanities and the Classics, 25(3), 147-148. https://doi.org/10.2307/arion.25.3.0147

Walters, B. C., (TRANS.) (2017). From Propertius. Arion - Journal of Humanities and the Classics, 25(1), 37-38. https://doi.org/10.2307/arion.25.1.0037

Walters, B. (2017). The circulation and delivery of Cicero's Post Reditum ad Populum. Transactions of the American Philological Association, 147(1), 79-99.

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