Jesus College Record 2022

The Fowler Lecture 2023
Honouring the memory of Don Fowler, former Fellow and Tutor in
Classics at Jesus, the 21st Fowler Lecture will be delivered by
Monica Gale, Professor in Classics at Trinity College, Dublin.
Professor Gale will speak to the title ‘Five Ways of Reading Catullus’
in the lecture theatre of the Stelios Ioannou Classics Centre,
66 St Giles, at 5pm on Thursday 4 May 2023.
Professor Gale graduated from Cambridge and went on to hold
posts at the University of Newcastle and Royal Holloway,
University of London, before joining the staff at Trinity College
Dublin in 1998. Her research centres on the poetry of the Late
Roman Republic and the Augustan period (especially the works of
Catullus, Lucretius, Virgil and Propertius), with a particular focus on
issues of genre and intertextuality. She explores the ways in which
relationships between literary texts serve to create meaning, and is
interested in poetic self-representation with reference both to
literary predecessors and to generic convention. Other areas of
expertise include Greek and Roman didactic poetry and the uses of
myth in ancient literature. In addition to monographs Myth and
Poetry in Lucretius (CUP 1994), Virgil on the Nature of Things: The
Georgics, Lucretius and the Didactic Tradition (CUP 2000), and
Lucretius and the Didactic Epic (Bristol Classical Press 2001), she has
edited Latin Epic and Didactic Poetry: Genre, Tradition and Individuality
(Classical Press of Wales 2004) and co-edited with David
Scourfield (a former Fowler Lecturer) Texts and Violence in the
Roman World (CUP 2018). She is currently writing a commentary
on the complete poems of Catullus for the Cambridge Greek and
Latin Classics series.
Attendance at the lecture is free, and all are invited to drinks
afterwards in the Classics Centre. Dinner with the speaker in Jesus
afterwards (three courses with wine, at a cost of £50) is available
on application: please email armand.dangour@jesus.ox.ac.uk.
Lesbia and her sparrow by Sir John Poynter.
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