Dr Joe Watson

@joewatstein.bsky.social

Teaching fellow at Warwick. Ovid/Cavafy-stanning. Also teaching Latin, often writing, sometimes sleeping. Extremely queer, possibly here. He/Him/His.

It is once again proofs day—this time for a piece, forthcoming in Mnemosyne, on the meaning of ‘incest’ at Rome. It’s also the first day of term and ‘move offices’ day; all in all a busy day.

Photograph of some article proofs. Tightly spaced writing on an A4 page.

Delighted that my latest article, ‘Hell is Other Poets: Tibullus, Ovid and Statius in Queer Elysium’ is out in the Journal of Roman Studies: doi.org/10.1017/S007.... In it, I argue that the Underworld operates, for Latin poetics, as a multiply-accessible ‘shared space’ [1/3]

Hell is other poets: Tibullus, Ovid and Statius in queer Elysium | The Journal of Roman Studies | Cambridge Core

Hell is other poets: Tibullus, Ovid and Statius in queer Elysium - Volume 115

doi.org

Lovely to see this out (in FirstView): "Beyond gay history month: queering the past with ‘Queering the Past(s)’" (tinyurl.com/4vrskdw2), my new article in the Journal of Classics Teaching about using resources from queeringthepasts.com to provide LGBTQ+ education in [1/2]

Beyond gay history month: queering the past with ‘Queering the Past(s)’ | Journal of Classics Teaching | Cambridge Core

Beyond gay history month: queering the past with ‘Queering the Past(s)’

tinyurl.com

Lovely to get my author copies of the Alaudae translation cooked up by Michael Lombardi-Nash. I hadn’t read my translation (of Issue 7) since I sent it off in 2021, so it was delightful to revisit it this morning!

Front cover of a book in yellow, entitled Alaudae, edited by Llewelyn Morgan and Michael Lombardi-Nash.Photo of a double page of a book. The left page gives a Latin text of Issue 7 of the Alaudae, while the right page gives the same text in English.

Clearly, ‘tis the season, for it is once again proofs’ day! This time, I am working on proofs for a short chapter, ‘Classical Cavafy and Cavafy among the Classicists’, for the forthcoming Bloomsbury volume, ‘Cavafy as World Literature’! Due out at the end of this year.

Black text of an academic article on white paper. Title: Classical Cavafy and Cavafy among the classicists.

Hello! My new article is now out in Arethusa: '(Re)Producing The Egyptian: Arboricultural Cultivation Of The Roman State In Lucan’s Civil War'. I consider the epic's tree imagery as metaphor for the Roman state, pointing to the protagonists' attempts at cultivation & propagation.

Screenshot. Text reads: (Re)Producing The Egyptian: Arboricultural Cultivation Of The Roman State In Lucan’s Civil War. Esther Meijer. Abstract: This article examines the changing relationship between Rome and Egypt in Lucan’s Civil War. It applies philological and ideological analyses to the epic’s destabilisation and restabilisation of the body politic of the Roman state as discernible from two interrelated sets of imagery: firstly, the language of arboriculture and propagation as evoked by Virgil’s Georgics and Theocritus’s 17th Idyll; and, secondly, the mortuary treatments applied to Pompey’s body parts. Key to the restabilisation of the res publica is Caesar’s interpretation of Pompey’s remains, which reproduces Egypt as “Other” in relation to Rome while acknowledging its now enduring presence within the empire.
Yale Classics Library@yaleclassicslib.bsky.social · 2y ago

New issue Arethusa Vol. 57, No. 3 (2024) muse.jhu.edu/issue/53371 @projectmuse.bsky.social @hopkinspress.bsky.social Visions of Egypt in Imperial Latin Literature @elainam42.bsky.social @julesadv.bsky.social @esthermeijer.bsky.social

journal cover

Had the rare experience yesterday of receiving wonderful peer reviews from reviewer 1 *and* reviewer 2 for a forthcoming piece! Apparently, my work is “stunning”, “stellar”, “exquisite” and “radical”. Words to be remembered when reviewer 2 returns to their usual tricks…