Dr. James Uden

Biography

James Uden is a Professor in the Department of Classics at Yale University, specializing in Latin literature and its afterlife across different eras. He has explored a wide variety of authors and genres, including Catullus, Virgil, love elegy, and satire, with a secondary interest in British and American Romanticism and the Gothic. Uden trained as a lawyer in his hometown of Sydney, Australia, before earning his PhD in Classics from Columbia University in 2011. He has taught for fourteen years at Boston University prior to joining Yale in Fall 2025. His works include "Invisible Satirist: Juvenal in Second-Century Rome" (Oxford, 2015) and "Spectres of Antiquity: Classical Literature and the Gothic, 1740-1830" (Oxford, 2020), the latter of which won the Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit from the Society for Classical Studies and was a finalist for the Allan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prize. He is currently working on several projects, including a book tentatively titled "Heroic Vulnerability," which examines representations of the wounded body in the epics of Virgil, Ovid, and Lucan. Additionally, his project "Shadowboxer’s Speech" investigates the rhetorical form of declamation as part of Roman education and aims to present new ethical ideas and alternate social possibilities through this medium.

Research Interests