James Calvin Taylor

James Calvin Taylor recently completed his doctorate at Harvard University with a dissertation titled, “Plumbing the Depths: Geological Processes, Deep Time, and the Shaping of Landscapes in Classical Literature,” and will be joining Hamilton College as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Fall 2020. His research engages with texts as diverse as Aristotle’s Meteorologica and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, drawing on interpretative frameworks from the history of science, ecocriticism, and the philosophy of history. The ecological impetus of his dissertation integrates two separate strands of his wider research interests, namely the role of philosophy in the intellectual and literary cultures of classical antiquity, as evidenced by an article on Cicero’s Brutus and its Platonic intertexts (Rosetta 2013), and the cultural and metapoetic significance of landscapes in Latin literature, as reflected in a book chapter on Lucan’s alternative explanations of the Syrtes (published with Bloomsbury).