Clem Wood

I began my graduate studies in Princeton’s Department of Classics in 2012. My main areas of interest are Greek, Roman, and humanistic historiography; the interactions between literature, politics, and culture in the early Roman empire; and the reinvention of antiquity in the Renaissance. My primary postclassical interest is how early modern humanists used ancient authors to construct the past and understand the present. Recent projects include a study of debates about Tacitus’ style in the first two centuries after his rediscovery and an independent reading course in humanistic historiography and scholarship of the 15th and 16th centuries.

I studied Classics at Harvard (A.B. 2008), with a thesis on how Horace draws on the Ciceronian discourse of ideal friendship to portray his relationship with Maecenas, and was the Harlech Scholar at New College, Oxford (M.St. 2009), where I wrote my dissertation on Nicias’ letter in Thucydides Book 7 as a history within the History.

After Oxford, I spent a year leading historical and cultural walking tours in Rome and teaching English to Italians as a second language. In 2010, I moved back to the U.S. and taught Latin and Greek at the Marymount School of New York for two years until beginning at Princeton.