Jeri Debrohun
Associate Professor of Classics:
Macfarlane House 205
Phone: 401-863-2977
Phone 2: 401-863-1267
Jeri_DeBrohun@brown.edu
Jeri DeBrohun's research interests include both Hellenistic Greek and Republican and Augustan Latin poetry and culture, with particular emphasis on allusion and genre. She is also interested in cultural poetics and is currently researching and writing a book on dress as an expressive medium in the ancient world.
Biography
Jeri DeBrohun received her B.A. with Honors in Classics from The University of Cincinnati in 1985 and completed her Ph.D. in Classical Studies at The University of Michigan in 1992. She taught for three years (1992-1995) in the Department of Classics at Florida State University before joining the Brown faculty in 1995. In addition to teaching courses in Greek and Latin prose and poetry to both undergraduates and graduate students, Professor DeBrohun regularly teaches Greek Tragedy in translation and Ancient Utopias and Imaginary Places.
Seminars she recently taught include Roman Satire, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Propertius Book 1, Propertius Book 2, Tibullus, Ovid's Exile Poetry, Lucretius, Greek and Roman Epigram (from its Greek beginnings through Martial).
At Brown, she served as the Graduate Adviser and Director of Graduate Studies in Classics from 1997-2007. She also advised undergraduates regularly. In 2004, she was awarded the John Rowe Workman Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Humanities.
Interests
She is primarily a literary critic, with particular interests in Republican and Augustan Poetry at Rome and in the sophisticated Hellenistic poetry which informed this Roman poetry, including that of Callimachus, Apollonius, Theocritus, and the epigrammatists. Much of her work is focused on genre and allusion, and these are central concerns in her first book, Roman Propertius and the Reinvention of Elegy (2003) and in most of her published articles, including "Catullan Intertextuality: Apollonius and the Allusive Plot of Catullus 64," a chapter in The Blackwell Companion to Catullus (edited by Marilyn Skinner; published in 2007). She also has an interest in cultural poetics, an area of classical studies in which she became more deeply involved when engaged in work on Propertius 4 and "the rhetoric of fashion," and she is currently writing a book on "Greco-Roman Dress as an Expressive Medium" for Duckworth's Classical Inter/Faces Series. Her other work in progress includes articles on Latin poetry and on Greek and Roman epigram, as well as a wide-ranging study of the definition and production of elegiac poetry from antiquity to the present.
Degrees
B.A. in Classics (Honors), The University of Cincinnati,1985, Ph.D. in Classical Studies, The University of Michigan, 1992
Awards
John Rowe Workman Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Humanities, 2004
Affiliations
American Philological Association
Classical Association of New England
Funded Research
N/A