Staff profile

Drawing on training in both English and Classics, my work bridges boundaries between classical antiquity and classics after antiquity to challenge perceived divisions between the study of ‘antiquity’ and the study of ‘reception’. 

My first monograph, Shaggy Crowns: Ennius’ Annales and Virgil’s Aeneid (based on a DPhil from Magdalen College, Oxford), is published in the Oxford Classical Monographs series with Oxford University Press (2013). The first book-length study of the relationship between the two poets in almost one-hundred years, it presents a model of intertextuality as a mode of reception embedded in the ways in which Rome remembered its past.

Tied in with my work on the ERC-funded ‘Living Poets’ project (2012-2015), my next cluster of publications focuses on how imaginary life-writing has shaped the reception of ancient texts. My second monograph, Afterlives of the Roman Poets: Biofiction and the Reception of Latin Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2019; paperback 2024), is a cultural history of the reception of Roman poetry as seen through the fictional biographies (or ‘biofictions’) of its authors. The book brings the concept of biofiction to bear on the role of life-writing in Roman poetry and its reception, and has been described as ‘one of the most significant contributions to current debates on the form’ (Journal of Roman Studies, 2021). The project also underpins Tombs of the Ancient Poets (Oxford University Press, 2018), edited with Barbara Graziosi, which looks at the poet’s tomb as a site of reception between text and material culture.

My more recent work (supported by an AHRC Leadership Fellowship, 2020-2022) brings together my interests in fragments and reception. Fragmentary Modernisms: The Classical Fragment in Literary and Visual Cultures, 1896-1950 investigates the ways in which the modernist fragment is bound up with the modern reception of the classical fragment. The project monograph (Oxford University Press, 2023) was recently shortlisted for the London Hellenic Prize.

I am currently developing two new research projects. The first, Jew-Greeks: Classical Reception and the Cultures of Hebraism, unpicks the ways in which the imagined polarities of Greek and Jew, Hellenism and Hebraism (dubbed by Matthew Arnold ‘the two poles of our culture’) have shaped the modern reception of classical antiquity, primarily from the perspectives of Jewish actors themselves: as philologists, archaeologists, collectors, bibliophiles, artists, writers, or translators. The second project, on lost Latin literature, revisits Henry Bardon’s La Littérature latine inconnue (1952) through modern theoretical approaches (including biofiction), to think about the roles and processes of loss and ‘recovery’ in the reception antiquity.

I edit the book series New Directions in Classics (Bloomsbury) with Fiachra Mac Góráin and Charles Martindale. I am executive committee member of the Classical Reception Studies Network, member of the Internationaler Arbeitskreis Hermann Broch, and affiliated member of the Princeton Postclassicisms network.

PhD Supervision

I welcome enquiries from potential PhD students and postdoctoral researchers interested in topics in Latin literature and classical reception, biography/life-writing, fragments and fragmentation, classics in twentieth-century literature (especially modernism), and other topics related to my research.

School Talks and Outreach

I am very happy to give school talks on topics in Latin literature (especially Virgil) and Classical reception for students of Classics, Classical Civilization and English Literature.

• Latin Poetry
• Classical Reception
• Biography and Biofiction
• Fragments and Fragmentation
• Classics and Modernism

Authored book

• Goldschmidt, N. (2023). Fragmentary Modernism : The Classical Fragment in Literary and Visual Cultures, c.1896 - c.1936. Oxford University Press
• Goldschmidt, N. (2019). Afterlives of the Roman Poets: Biofiction and the Reception of Latin Poetry. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316847879
• Goldschmidt, N. (2013). Shaggy Crowns: Ennius' Annales and Virgil's Aeneid. Oxford University Press

Chapter in book

• Goldschmidt, N. (2022). Poetry, Prosecution, and the Author Function. In E. Bexley, & I. Ziogas (Eds.), Roman Law and Latin Literature (147-168). Bloomsbury. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350276666.ch-008
• Goldschmidt, N. (2020). Reading the 'Implied Author' in the De rerum natura. In D. O'Rourke (Ed.), Approaches to Lucretius (43-58). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108379854.004
• Goldschmidt, N. (2020). After-Lives: 20th-century Biographical Receptions of Greek and Roman Poets. In K. de Temmerman (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Biography. Oxford University Press
• Goldschmidt, N. (2019). Orts, scraps, and fragments': Translation, Non-Translation, and the Fragments of Ancient Greece. In J. Harding, & J. Nash (Eds.), Modernism and Non-Translation. Oxford University Press
• Goldschmidt, N. (2018). Ovid's Tombs: Afterlives of a Poetic corpus. In N. Goldschmidt, & B. Graziosi (Eds.), Tombs of the Ancient Poets: Between Literary Reception and Material Culture. Oxford University Press
• Goldschmidt, N., & Graziosi, B. (2018). Introduction. In N. Goldschmidt, & B. Graziosi (Eds.), Tombs of the Ancient Poets: Between Literary Reception and Material Culture. Oxford University Press
• Goldschmidt, N. (2017). Cameo Roles: Virgil in Ovidian Biography. In P. Hardie, & A. Powell (Eds.), The Ancient Lives of Virgil: Literary and Historical Studies (115-132). Classical Press of Wales

Edited book

• Goldschmidt, N., & Graziosi, B. (Eds.). (2018). Tombs of the Ancient Poets: Between Literary Reception and Material Culture. Oxford University Press

Journal Article

• Goldschmidt, N. (2017). Textual Monuments: Reconstructing Carthage in Augustan Literary Culture. Classical Philology: A Journal Devoted to Research in Classical Antiquity, 112(3), 368-383. https://doi.org/10.1086/692621
• Goldschmidt, N. (2012). Absent Presence: pater Ennius in Renaissance Europe. Classical Receptions Journal, 4(1), 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clr011

Other (Digital/Visual Media)

• Goldschmidt, N. (in press). Plautus: A Guide to Selected Sources
• Goldschmidt, N. (2013). Ovid: A Guide to Selected Sources
• Goldschmidt, N. (2013). Lucretius: A Guide to Selected Sources
• Goldschmidt, N. (2013). Terence: A Guide to Selected Sources
• Goldschmidt, N. (2013). Lucan: A Guide to Selected Sources
• Goldschmidt, N. (2013). Virgil: A Guide to Selected Sources

Other (Print)

• Goldschmidt, N. (online). Pompeian Group Therapy