Erik Fredericksen

I am a graduate student in the Department of Classics at Princeton. Within Greek and Latin literature, my work focuses particularly on lyric poetry, pastoral, and Augustan literature. My long-standing interest in the reception of classics in 20th-century and contemporary poetry has gradually expanded into a wider interest in bringing ancient texts into mutually enriching dialogues with all sorts of later authors, texts, and traditions.

I received my undergraduate degree from Harvard in 2012, where I wrote my thesis on modern English translations of selected Horatian odes. I then completed an M.St. at Oxford, where my dissertation examined Vergil’s second eclogue and its critical and poetic reception history. Both of these projects have spurred continuing interests in the theory and practice of translation and in the histories made by texts of desire as they circulate from their immediate contexts into periods with radically different ideas of sexuality and love. In the future, I also hope to work more on literature and the environment, investigating the place of ancient pastoral and didactic texts in contemporary environmental poetry and thought.