William Gladhill

William  Gladhill
Contact Information
Address: 

Leacock, Rm 609
Department of History 855 Sherbrooke West
Montreal, Quebec
H3A 2T7

Phone: 
514-398-4400 ext.089512
Email address: 
charles.gladhill [at] mcgill.ca
Position: 
Associate Professor
Office: 
Leacock, Rm 609
Degree(s): 

PhD, Stanford University, 2008

Specialization by time period: 
2000 BCE - 600 CE
Specialization by geographical area: 
Europe
Selected publications: 

Book:
Rethinking Roman Alliance: A Study in Poetics and Society (Cambridge 2016)
Rethinking Roman Alliance is a cultural reconstruction of the processes, contexts, and tensions inherent in the performance of ritual alliances. Such alliances are not merely restricted to international relations between Rome and another polity, but they permeate not only the stratified codes of conduct throughout Roman society, but they also bring order and coherence to the cosmos. Each moment of alliance pushes and pulls on all prior alliances in each of their various social and cosmological spheres. The manuscript completely alters modern conceptions of Roman alliance in the study and evaluation of a broad range of prose and poetic works. In particular Lucretius, Vergil, Manilius, and Lucan all engage with the poetry of alliance from differing perspectives that open a window into the nature of Roman culture and society. Roman narratives about alliance raise fundamental questions about the tension inherent in forming unions within an empire and a highly competitive social environment.

Selected Articles and Chapters
“Subversive Khoreia in Plato’s Protagoras.” ICS (2014) 39: 17-31
“Domus of Fama and Republican Space in Ovid’s in Augustan Poetry” in the Roman Republic, J. Farrel and D. Nelis eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
“The Poetics of Human Sacrifice in Vergil’s Aeneid” in Human Sacrifice: Its Representation in a Cross-Cultural Perspective, a special edition of Kernos, edited by Pierre Bonnechere (University of Leige, 2013).
Vergil Encyclopedia entries: Antonio da Firenze, Arae, Altars, Ants, Insects, Richard Heinze, Treaty, Blessed Isles, Oaths, Mettius Fufetius (Harvard University Press, 2013).
“The Emperor’s No Clothes: Suetonius and the Dynamics of Corporeal Ecphrasis,” CA 31 (2012) 315-48.
“Sons, Mothers, and Sex: Aeneid 1.314-20 and the Hymn to Aphrodite Reconsidered,” Vergilius 58 (2012) 159-168.
“Gods, Caesars, and Fate in Aeneid 1 and Metamorphoses 15,” Dictynna 9 (2012) 1-17.
“The Poetics of Alliance in Vergil’s Aeneid,” Dictynna 6 (2009) 36-69.

Publication files: 
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