Christian Kaesser

Christian Kaesser studies Latin literature, with a focus on the poetry of the Republican and Augustan periods. He analyzes the intercultural discourse by which Roman authors adapt and transform their Greek models; and he is interested in the interaction of Latin poetry with ancient philosophy and rhetoric, contrasting the ideas of ancient philosophers and rhetoricians with those of modern literary theorists. In a book-length study he is currently preparing on Callimachus' Aitia, Propertius IV, and Ovid's Fasti, entitled Causes and Cases. Aetiological Elegy in Ancient Greece and Rome, he merges these interests. In addition, he likes to work as a textual critic and at times edits Greek papyri; and he has an interest in Rome's Christian poetry and the ways Christian authors adapt and transform their pagan models.

Publications

(ed.), P.Oxy. inventory nr. 47 5B.45/B(1-2)a = Hexameter Verse, probably a Jewish Hellenistic apocalyptic prophecy similar to Or. Sib. 3.71-81 (second century CE), in: The Oxyrhynchus Papyri (forthcoming).

(ed.), P.Oxy. inventory nr. 27 3B.58/F(b) = Apollonius Rhodius 4.232-42 and 269-280, in: The Oxyrhynchus Papyri (forthcoming).

"Deviations of a Genre: Prudentius Peristephanon 11 and the Later Elegiac Tradition", in Liveley, G./Salzman, P. (eds.), Latin Elegy and Narrativity: Fragments of Story, Columbus 2007 (forthcoming).

"The Poet and the 'Polis': Callimachus' Aetia as Didactic Poem", in: Reitz, C./Horster, M. (edd.), Wissensvermittlung in dichterischer Gestalt, Stuttgart: Steiner 2005, 95-114.

"Callimachus fr. 1 Pf. on the Meaning of Song," Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 150 (2004), 39-42.

"Tweaking the Real: Visual Arts and the Gap between History and Morality in Plutarch's Lives," Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 44 (2004), 2004, 361-74.

"The Body Is Not Painted On. Ekphrasis and Exegesis in Prudentius Peristephanon 9", Ramus 31 (2002), 158-74.