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Denise McCoskey
Professor
French, Italian, and Classical Studies

Denise McCoskey

Contact Info

513-529-1486
105 Irvin Hall

Introduction

Denise Eileen McCoskey is a Professor of classics and affiliate in Black World Studies. Her main area of research focuses on the role of race in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, as well as the reception and distortion of ancient ideas about race in more modern eras. In addition to her other publications, she is the author of Race: Antiquity and Its Legacy (2012) and served as editor of the recently published A Cultural History of Race in Antiquity (2021).

Research Interests

  • Race in the ancient world
  • Modern reception of ancient ideas about race
  • Greek tragedy

Courses Taught

  • CLS 121: Classical Mythology (on both Miami’s Oxford and Hamilton campuses)
  • CLS 121.H: Classical Mythology (honors version)
  • CLS 210.P/CLS 310.P: From the Lair of the Cyclops to the Surface of the Moon: Travel and Self-Definition in Antiquity
  • CLS 210.R: Race & Ethnicity in Antiquity
  • CLS 212: Greek & Roman Tragedy
  • CLS 235/335: Women in Antiquity
  • CLS 310.E: Conflict in Greco-Roman Egypt
  • CLS 310.J: Jews Among the Greeks & Romans
  • CLS 310.L: Ancient Rome & Modern Europe: The Roman Past in the Making of Modern Europe (taught at Miami’s Luxembourg campus in summer 2008)
  • CLS 316: Greek & Roman Lyric Poetry
  • CLS 333 Migration and Multiculturalism in the World of Alexander the Great (fall 2021)
  • CLS 380A: Greeks and Romans Bearing Gifts? Colonial America and the Classical Tradition
  • CLS 380.I/E: Identity and Cultural Difference in Greco-Roman Egypt
  • CLS 380.J: Women, Representation, and the State (co-taught)
  • CLS 402: The Age of Augustus
  • HON 300A: “Identity and Cultural Difference in Contemporary Britain” (at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge)
  • IDS 151: (co-taught) Diversity Seminar
  • LAT 101 & LAT 102: Beginning Latin LAT 201 & 202: Intermediate Latin
  • LAT 310.G: Ovid’s Heroides & the Epistolary Tradition in Latin Elegy
  • LAT 310.G: Ovid’s Metamorphoses
  • LAT 310.N: The Latin Novel/Petronius: Text and Context
  • LAT 310.T: Roman Comedy/Terence
  • LAT 310.P: Latin Love Poetry
  • LAT 410.F: Seneca

Education

Ph.D. Duke University, Durham, NC, USA. Classical Studies. Department of Classical Studies. June 1995.  

Title of dissertation:  “Gender Differentiation and Narrative Construction in Propertius.”
Director:  Professor Lawrence Richardson, Jr.

B.A. Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA.  Classics and Archaeology. Departments of Anthropology and Classics.  May 1990.

Publications

Books

  • editor, The Cultural History of Race in Antiquity (Bloomsbury, 2022); including a 10,000-word introduction
  • author with Zara Torlone, Latin Love Poetry (I. B Tauris/Oxford University Press, 2013)
  • author, Race:  Antiquity and its Legacy (I.B. Tauris/Oxford University Press, 2012)
  • editor with Emily Zakin, Bound by the City:  Greek Tragedy, Sexual Difference and the Formation of the Polis (SUNY Press, 2009)

Articles

  • “Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve and John Scott: race and the rise of American classical philology,” American Journal of Philology 143.2 (2022), 247-277.
  • “The Subjects of Slavery in 19th-century American Latin Schoolbooks,” Classical Journal Forum 115.1 (2019), 88–113. 
  • “Naming the Fault in Question:  Theorizing Racism among the Greeks and Romans” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 13 (Fall 2006), 243-67.
  • “Diaspora in the Reading of Jewish History, Identity, and Difference” Diaspora 12.3 (2003), 387-418.   
  •  “By Any Other Name?  Ethnicity and the Study of Ancient Identity” Classical Bulletin 79.1 (2003), 93-109.
  • “Race Before ‘Whiteness’:  Studying Identity in Ptolemaic Egypt” Critical Sociology 28 (2002), 13-39.
  • “Murder by Letters:  Interpretation, Identity and the Instability of Text in Norfolk’s Lemprière’s Dictionary,” Classical and Modern Literature 20/2 (2000), 39-59.
  • “Reading Cynthia and Sexual Difference in the Poems of Propertius,” Ramus 28 (1999), 16-39.
  • “Answering the Multicultural Imperative:  A Course on Race and Ethnicity in Classics,” Classical World 92 (1999), 553-561.

Book Chapters

  • “Ethnicity, Race, and Nationalism:  Ancient and Modern Approaches,” in A Cultural History of Democracy in Antiquity, eds. Paul Cartledge and Carol Atack (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 137-154.
  • “The Great Escape:  Reading Artemisia in Herodotus’ Histories and 300:  Rise of an Empire” in Exploring Gender Diversity in the Ancient World, eds. Allison Surtees and Jennifer Dyer  (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 209-221. 
  • with Mary Jean Corbett, “Virginia Woolf, Richard Jebb, and Sophocles’ Antigone,” in A Companion to Sophocles, ed. Kirk Ormand (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 462-76.
  • with Emily Zakin, “Introduction,” in Bound by the City:  Greek Tragedy, Sexual Difference and the  Formation of the Polis (SUNY Press, 2009), 1-14.
  • “The Loss of Abandonment in Sophocles’ Electra” in Bound by the City:  Greek Tragedy, Sexual Difference and the Formation of the Polis (SUNY Press, 2009), 221-245.
  • “Gender at the Crossroads of Empire:  Locating Women in Strabo’s Geography” in Strabo’s Cultural Geography:  The Making of a Kolossourgia, eds. Daniela Dueck, Hugh Lindsay, and Sarah Pothecary (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 56-72.
  •  “On Black Athena, Hippocratic Medicine, and Roman Imperial Edicts:  Egyptians and the Problem of Race in Antiquity,” in Race and Ethnicity—Across Time, Space and Discipline, ed. Rodney D. Coates (Brill Press, 2004), 297-330.
  • “‘I, whom she detested so bitterly’:  Slavery and the Violent Division of Women in Aeschylus’ Oresteia,” in Differential Equations:  Women and Slaves in Greco-Roman Culture, edd. Sheila Murnaghan and Sandra R. Joshel (Routledge 1998), 35-55.

Encyclopedia entries

  • Entry on “race” (5,000-word review essay) for the Oxford Classical Dictionary digital edition (2020):  https://oxfordre.com/classics/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199381135.001.0001/acrefore-9780199381135-e-5497 
  • “Race, Class, and Ethnicity:  Greek World” in the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Gender Studies (2014)

Book Reviews

  • Review of Tessa Roynon, Toni Morrison and the Classical Tradition:  Transforming American Culture in International Journal of the Classical Tradition 25 (2018), 190-200.
  • Review of Jacqueline M. Carlon, Pliny’s Women in Sehepunkte Ausgabe 11 (2011), nr. 2.
  • Review of Roy K. Gibson, Excess and Restraint:  Propertius, Horace, and Ovid’s Ars Amatoria in Classical Journal 105.1 (2009), 76-78.
  • Review of Eve D’Ambra Roman Women and Caroline Vout, Power and Eroticism in Imperial Rome in Scripta Classica Israelica 27 (2008), 147-149.
  • Review of Phiroze Vasunia, The Gift of the Nile:  Hellenizing Egypt from Aeschylus to Alexander in Theatre Journal 55.1 (2003), 182-83.
  • “Education Under the Raj?  Greek Paideia in Egypt” (a review of Gymnastics of the Mind) in Classical and Modern Literature 23/1 (2003), 125-133.

Work in Progress

Dr. McCoskey is currently at work on a multi-year project exploring the role of eugenics in early twentieth-century American classical scholarship, for which she received a National Endowment of the Humanities summer stipend in 2018. This project examines the ways racist thought permeated the field of classics in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century through concepts and methods derived from the contemporary eugenics movement.