Dr Talitha Kearey

Dr Talitha Kearey

Director of Research

Lecturer in Latin

Researcher profile

Email
tezk1@st-andrews.ac.uk
Office
s10
Location
Swallowgate

 

Biography

Originally from Brighton, I gained my BA, MPhil and PhD in Classics from the University of Cambridge (2009-18). I then worked as a lecturer in Oxford for a year, returned to Cambridge to take up a Junior Research Fellowship at St John’s College (2019-23), and arrived in St Andrews in 2023.

Teaching

In 2025/26 I am contributing to a number of undergraduate and postgraduate modules in Latin and Classical Studies, including an Honours module on 'Roman Pastoral and its Reception'. Previous Honours modules include 'Roman Literature and Queer Theory', 'Transformed Texts: Rewriting Roman Literature', 'Horace', and modules on Roman Biography, Elegy and Epic. At postgraduate level, I contribute to the MLitt ‘Latin Literary Culture’ and 'Interdisciplinary Topics in Gender Studies' modules.

I would be very happy to supervise postgraduate dissertations in any of the areas listed in this profile, as well as:

  • Latin literature, mainly c. 1st century BCE to 2nd century CE, but extending into late antiquity
  • Roman pastoral writing
  • Anonymity, forgery, impersonation and textual transformation
  • Literary classical reception, especially in Anglophone writing of the last two centuries
  • Classics and queer studies
  • Ancient literary criticism, ancient book history, and the intersection of the two

I am always interested in discussing possible research ideas with potential applicants; please feel free to get in touch at any time.

Research areas

I specialise in Latin literature and its reception, with a particular focus on reading cultures, authorial self-fashioning, poetics, and the social, political and material conditions underpinning literary production. I am currently working on my first book, The Poet at Work: Virgil, Authorship and the Poetics of Biography, which explores how Virgil’s ancient readers imagined his life and his authorial techniques. It makes a case for taking ancient biographical writing seriously: not as historical fact, but as sites where readers creatively explored ideas of authorship and negotiated literary practices; the textual artefacts they themselves produced combine sophisticated literary interpretation with a real sense of imaginative play. My recent publications related to this project include articles and chapters on the pseudo-Virgilian Culex, Fulgentius’s necromantic commentary on the Aeneid, Tacitus’s Dialogus; and on the affective power of the embodied authorial voice in ancient and modern theories of reading. I have also published on acrostics in Horace’s Satires and the use of enslaved labour in editing Roman texts. A volume I co-edited (with Max Leventhal and Thomas J. Nelson) on Collaboration in Greek and Roman Literature is in press with CUP.

My current research projects include pieces on otium and ecocriticism; the Vandal poet Luxorius; Suetonius's literary workers; and Ovid's gimmicks. I am in the early stages of two nascent book projects. The first of these focuses on the poems written by the Roman emperors, exploring the literary role of the emperor in the Roman imagination from Caesar to Hadrian. The second re-evaluates the Roman concept of otium through a lens of queer temporality, exploring how an idea of otium as resistance to reproductive futurity both runs through the works of 1st-century BCE and CE authors and paradoxically underlies the idea of authorship itself.

PhD supervision

  • Bradley French
  • David Lepidi
  • Adam Wilson

Selected publications

 

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