Emmanuel instantly felt like home
and I am very sad to have to leave
Professor Christopher Whitton
MA, PhD, FRCO
Official Fellow; Deputy Praelector; Director of Studies in Classics
Professor of Latin Literature
Biography
I was an undergraduate and graduate student at St John's College, Cambridge, and spent a year as a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard. Since 2007 I have taught in the Faculty of Classics and been a Fellow of Emmanuel College. In 2012-14 I held an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship at the Freie Universität Berlin and Rostock University. Besides my work in Classics, I am a trained church musician and was Director of Music at Emmanuel from 2007 to 2022.
Teaching Interests
Most of my undergraduate teaching is in Latin literature, for which I teach all papers; I also teach Greek and Latin language and occasionally Greek literature. I have supervised Part II dissertations and MPhil work on a wide range of topics and authors from Homer to Wieland, and PhD work on Quintilian, Pliny, Tacitus, Juvenal and Suetonius among others. I welcome enquiries from potential graduate students, especially (but not only) those working on imperial Latin prose and the Trajanic period. I also give talks to school students and teachers, including several courses on massolit.io.
Research
I work on Latin literature of the early Roman Empire, especially Pliny the Younger and Tacitus, with particular interests in prose style, intertextuality and the intersection of literature and history. My commentary on Pliny’s second book of Epistles appeared in the Cambridge ‘green and yellow’ series in 2013, and a monograph entitled The Arts of Imitation in Latin Prose: Pliny’s Epistles/Quintilian in Brief (Cambridge) was published in 2019. I have co-edited Oxford Readings in the Epistles of Pliny with Roy Gibson (Oxford, 2016), Roman Literature under Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian: Literary Interactions, AD 96-138 with Alice König (Cambridge, 2018), and the Cambridge Critical Guide to Latin Literature, again with Roy Gibson (Cambridge, 2024). My main projects at the moment are a 'green and yellow' commentary, on Tacitus Annals 14, a monograph provisionally entitled Tacitus revoiced: reading the HIstories with Pliny the Younger, and two children. I am a series editor of the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics ('green and yellows'), and serve on the publications committee of the Institute of Classical Studies.