Staff Profiles

Classics is fortunate to count the distinguished Latinist A.J. Woodman among its Visiting Professors. He has a long-standing connection with the University: he entered the then King’s College in Newcastle as an undergraduate in 1962 and, after doctoral work in Cambridge, returned to the University of Newcastle (as it had become) as Lecturer in Classics in 1968. Subsequently he was Professor of Latin at Leeds (1980-84) and Durham (1984-2004) and Basil L. Gildersleeve Professor of Classics at the University of Virginia (2004-17).

With the publication of Quality and Pleasure in Latin Poetry (1974) Tony Woodman and David West helped to pioneer literary-critical approaches to Latin literature. Their co-edited volume became the first in a well known series, of which the sixth and most recent, co-edited with Ian Du Quesnay, is Catullus: Poems, Books, Readers, which appeared in 2012.

Professor Woodman has published commentaries on the Tiberian historian Velleius Paterculus (1977, 1983) and on Tacitus, Annals 3 (1996), 4 (1989), 5 and 6 (2016), the first two in collaboration with Ronald Martin, as well as on Tacitus’ Agricola (2014). His work on ancient historical writing, and in particular his book Rhetoric in Classical Historiography (1988), are acknowledged to have had a profound influence on the way in which scholars now read and understand the historians of Greece and Rome. He has edited Tacitus and the Tacitean Tradition (with T.J. Luce, 1993), The Cambridge Companion to Tacitus (2009), and Latin Poetry and Historiography in the Early Empire: Generic Interactions (with J.F. Miller, 2010). With C.S. Kraus he co-authored Latin Historians (1997), and a collection of his papers on Tacitus was published as Tacitus Reviewed (1998). He has produced award-winning translations of Tacitus’ Annals (2004) and of Sallust (2008), and a volume of his selected papers was published under the title From Poetry to History in 2012. In 2015 he published Lost Histories: Selected Fragments of Roman Historical Writers as a Supplementary Volume to Histos.

Currently Professor Woodman is finishing a commentary on Tacitus, Annals 4 for the series Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries, preparing a new edition of Tacitus’ Annals for the series Oxford Classical Texts, and co-editing The Cambridge Companion to Catullus with Ian Du Quesnay. A list of his more recent articles may be found online.