Expertise

Latin Literature, Roman Culture, Ancient Warfare, Death and Commemoration, Landscape, Classical Reception Studies

Biography

Marian W. Makins received her Ph.D. in Classical Studies from the University of Pennsylvania after earning a B.A. in Classics and an M.A. in Latin from Columbia University. Her research interests include Latin literature; war, death, and commemoration in the ancient world; ecocriticism; and classical receptions, especially those having to do with speculative fiction, children’s literature, and modern war landscapes (e.g., World War I, the American Civil War). Her current research project focuses on representations of war dead and landscape in late Republican and early Imperial Roman literature. She is also co-editing, with Bettina Reitz-Joosse and Chris Mackie, a volume on landscapes of war in Greek and Roman culture.

Selected Publications

• “Latin, Greek, and Other Classical ‘Nonsense' in the Work of Edward Lear,” forthcoming in Classical Reception and Children’s Literature: Greece, Rome and Childhood Transformed, ed. H. Lovatt and O. Hodkinson (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017).
• “Memories of (Ancient Roman) War in Tolkien’s Dead Marshes,” thersites 4 (2016): 199–240.
• “Refiguring the Roman Empire in The Hunger Games Trilogy,” in Classical Traditions in Science Fiction, ed. B. M. Rogers and B. E. Stevens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 280–306.

Courses Taught

• Latin and Ancient Greek
• Race in the Ancient Mediterranean
• Ancient War Games: Sport and Spectacle in Classical Antiquity
• Intellectual Heritage