Curriculum Vitae

N. Gregson G. Davis

243A Allen Bldg. Box 90103
Durham, NC 27708
919-636-2716 (home)
Personal

Birth: 20 October, 1940 in St.John's, Antigua, West Indies

Family: Spouse: Daphne L. Davis
Children: Anika, Julian, Oliver, & Sophia

Areas of Interest

rhetoric
semiotics
Classics
poetry

Professional Experience / Employment History

Duke University
Dean of Humanities, Arts and Sciences, 2004 - 2009
Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, 1994-present
Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature, 1994-present
Cornell University
Goldwin Smith Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature, 1991-94
Professor of Comparative Literature and Classics, 1989-1994
Stanford University
Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature, 1985-89
Associate Professor, 1975-85
Assistant Professor, 1969-75
Acting Assistant Professor, 1967-69
Awards, Honors, and Distinctions

Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, Duke University, 1994-present
Goldwin Smith Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature, Cornell University, 1991-94
King/Chavez/Parks Visiting Professor, University of Michigan, March 8-23, 1988
Internal Fellow, Stanford Humanities Center, 1983-84
University Fellow, Stanford University, 1975-77
Mellon Junior Faculty Leave Fellow, Stanford University, 1973-74
Study Fellow, Committee on the Comparative Study of Africa and the Stanford Unversity, 1971
Arthur D.Cory Travelling Fellow, Harvard University, 1961-63
Latin Orator, Harvard Commencement Exercises, 1960
Bowdoin Prizewinner in Latin Translation, Harvard College, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959
Selected Recent Invited Talks

Negritude as Performance: The Parade of Black Masks in Aimé Césaire's "Journal of Homecoming.", Florida International University Graduate Colloquium Lecture, 2009  
Framing a Dialogue on vicissitude (Vergil, Eclogues 1). New York University, 2009  
Il programma filosofico della prima egloga (Bucoliche, I) di Virgilio. University of Bologna, 2009  
Lectures on Vergil's Aeneid at Bard College and Purdue University, 2009  
"Antigua in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park: the historical and cultural context, Antigua, 13 November 2003  
'Shades of Borrowed Ancestors': The Figure of Helen in Derek Walcott's Omeros, Department of Classics, Oberlin College, May 3, 2002  
Fractured Beeches: Dissonance and its Resolution in Vergil's Bucolics.The 15th Russell and Kathryn Rutledge Memorial Lecture in Classics., University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tenessee, March 30, 2000  
Fractured Beeches: Loss and Consolation in Vergil's Bucolics., Department of Classics, Swarthmore College, February 2000  
The Hero and The Other in Vergil's Aeneid., Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington, Fall 1998  
Anacreonte in Orazio, Università di Padova, Dipartimento di Scienze dell' Antichità, Spring 1996  
Imago Scribentis: the inscription of the female writer in Ovid: Heroides 15, Invitational Lecture, Society for the Humanities, Cornell University, Spring 1994  
Scribentis Imago: the inscription of the female as elegiac composer in Ovid's Heroides 15, Leeds University: Leeds International Latin Seminar, Spring 1994  
Genre, polyphony, self-definition: the figure of Anacreon in Horatian lyric, American Philological Association: 125th annual Meeting. Program Unit: “Approaches to Horace, A Toast to another Two Thousand Years.", Winter 1993  
Between Cultures: Redrawing the Boundaries of a Liberal Education, New Directions for the 21st Century. St. Lawrence University, 1991  
The`plain meaning' of the text? Classical philology, hermeneutics, and the study of literature, Conference on Comparative Literature and the Classics. State University of New York at Buffalo, 1991  
Horace on the Art of Living, Second Elroy L. Bundy Memorial Lecture, Dominican College of San Rafael, San Rafael, California, 1990  
The Disavowal of Iambic Invective in Horace's Odes, Columbia Seminar on Classical Civilization. Columbia University, 1990  
The Death of Procris: The Grammar of the Hunt in the Erotic Narrative of Ovid's Metamophoses, Conference on Classics and Structuralis/PostStructural Thought, Princeton University, 1976  
Doctoral Theses Directed

Meredith Prince, Magic, Love and the Limits of Power: The Figure of Medea in Latin Love Elegy, (2002)  
Neil W Bernstein, Stimulant Manes: The Ghost in Lucan, Statius and Silius Itlalicus, (2000)  
Joseph Romero, The Ethics of Genre: Towards a Rhetoric of Apology in Vergilian Bucolic Discourse, (1999)  
David Banta, Literary Apology and Literary Genre in Martial, (1998)  

Publications

Books

  1. Aimé Césaire (1997), Cambridge University Press (Cambridge.)
  2. Polyhymnia: The Rhetoric of Horatian Lyric Discourse (1991), University of California Press (Berkeley/Los Angeles/ Oxford.)
  3. Non-Vicious Circle: Twenty Poems of Aimé Césaire (1984), Stanford University Press (Stanford, Ca..)
  4. The Death of Procris: "Amor" and the Hunt in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Instrumentum Litterarum, vol. 2 (1983), Edizioni dell' Ateneo (Rome, Italy.)
  5. Antigua Black: Portrait of an Island People (1971), Scrimshaw Press (San Francisco.)

Papers Published

  1. Introduction, in Eclogues,, Trans. Leonard Krisak (2010), University of Pennslyvania Press, 2010
  2. Jane Austen's Mansfield Park: the Antigua Collection (2004)
  3. Consolation in the Bucolic mode: The Epicurean cadence of Vergil's First Eclogue, in Vergil. Philodemus, and the Augustans, edited by David Armstrong, Jeffrey Fish, Patricia Johnston, and Marilyn Skinner (2003), pp. 63-74, University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas
  4. Ait Phaselus: The Caricature of Stylistic Inelegance in Catullus 4", "Materiali e discussioni per l'analysi dei testi classici.", vol. 48 (August, 2002), pp. 111-143
  5. Introduction, in Horace: Odes. Trans. James Michie, Modern Library (July, 2002), Random House
  6. 'Pastoral sites': aspects of bucolic transformation in Derek Walcott's Omeros., Classical World, vol. 93.1 (1999), pp. 43-9
  7. L'intertextualite comme strategie dans un programme postcolonial: 'Ferrements' d'Aime Cesaire., Europe, vol. 832-3 (1998), pp. 109-18
  8. 'With no Homeric Shadow': The Disavowal of Epic in Derek Walcott's Omeros., South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 96.2 (1997), pp. 321-33
  9. The figure of Anacreon in Horatian lyric, Hellas, vol. 7.2 (1996), pp. 63-74 (Special issue in honor of Wesley Trimpi.)
  10. Cupid at the Ivory Gates: Ausonius as a reader of Vergil, Colby Quarterly, vol. 30.3 (1992), pp. 162-170 (Studies in Roman Epic.)
  11. Desire and the Hunt in Ovid's Metamorphoses, edited by E.N.Genovese, The Burnett Lectures: A Quarter Century (1993), pp. 142-170 (San Diego, Ca..)
  12. Ingenii cumba?: literary aporia and the rhetoric of Horace's O navis referent (C.1.14), Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, vol. 132 (1989), pp. 331-345
  13. Quis...digne scripserit?: The topos of alter Homerus in Horace C.1.6, Phoenix, vol. 41.3 (1987), pp. 292-295
  14. Carmina/Iambi: the literary-generic dimension of Horace's Integer vitae (C.1, 22), Quaderni Urbinati di cultura classica, vol. 27.3 (1987), pp. 67-78 (Why Horace: A Collection of Interpretations, ed. W.S. Anderson, Bolchazy-Carducci, Wauconda, Ill, 1999, 51-62.)
  15. Silence and Decorum: Encomiastic Convention and the Epilogue of Horace Carm 3.2, Classical Antiquity, vol. 2.1 (1983), pp. 9-26 (Studies in Classical Lyric : A Homage to Elroy Bundy.)
  16. The Disavowal of the Grand (Recusatio) in two poems by Wallace Stevens, Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 17 no. 1-2 (1982), pp. 92-102
  17. The Problem of Closure in a carmen perpetuum: Aspects of Thematic Recapitulation in Ovid Metamorphoses 15, Grazer Beiträge, vol. 9 (1980), pp. 123-132
  18. Ovid Metamorphoses 3.442ff. and the Prologue to Menander's Misoumenos, Phoenix, vol. 32 (1978), pp. 339-342
  19. Towards a `Non-Vicious Circle': The Lyric of Aimé Césaire in English, Stanford French Review, vol. 1.1 (1977), pp. 135-146
  20. The Persona of Licymnia: a Revaluation of Horace Carm. 2.12, Philologus, vol. 1.119 (1975), pp. 70-83
  21. Ad Sidera Notus: The Rhetoric of Lament and Consolation in Fortunatus' De Gelesuintha, Agon, vol. 1.1 (1967), pp. 118-134

Edited Volumes

  1. A Companion to Horace (2010), Wiley-Blackwell Oxford 2010
  2. The Poetics of Derek Walcott: Intertextual perspectives, =South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 96 no. 2 (1997)

Articles

  1. Negritude-as-performance: the interplay of efficacious and inefficaciuos speech acts in Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, Research in African Literatures, vol. 41 no. 1 (Spring, 2010), pp. 142-154
  2. Aimé Césaire, in Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought, edited by Abiola Irele and Byodun Jeyifo (2010), Oxford University Press
  3. Derek Walcott, in Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought, edited by Abiola Irele and Byodun Jeyifo (2010)
  4. Reframing the Homeric: images of the Odyssey in the art of Derek Walcott and Romare Bearden, in Oxford Companion to Classical Receptions, edited by L. Hardwick and C. Stray (2007), pp. , 401-414, Oxford University Press
  5. 'Homecomings without Home': representations of (post)colonial nostos (homecoming) in the lyric of Aimé Césaire and Derek Walcott', in Homer in the Twentieth Century: between World Literature and the Western Canon, edited by Emily Greenwood & Barbara Graziosi (2007), Oxford University Press
  6. Ut pictura poesis, Agenda (Special Issue on Derek Walcott), vol. 39 no. 1-3 (2002-2003), pp. 198-9
  7. Beyond Disciplinary Hierarchies in Higher Education, in Bruce A. Kimball: The Condition of American Liberal Education: Pragmatism and a Changing Tradition, edited by Robert Orrill (1995), College Entrance Examination Board, New York
  8. Between Cultures: toward a redefinition of Liberal Education, in African Studies and the Undergraduate Curriculum, edited by P. Alden, D. Lloyd & A. Samatar (1994), pp. 19-3, Lynne Reicher Publishers, Boulder, Colorado & London
  9. Lyric worlds: Old and New under the sun, Arts and Sciences Newsletter, vol. 12 no. 1 (1991), Cornell University
  10. The mind at the end of the palm, The Stanford Magazine (1982), pp. 46-5

Forthcoming

  1. Thalea: the Interplay of Ideas in Vergil's Bucolics (2010) (Submitted for publication: 10/15/2010.)
  2. Daybook of a Homecoming. English translation, with Introduction, of Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (2010)
  3. Archilochus lyricus and Horatian melos, in In A Companion to Horace, edited by Gregson Davis (2010), Wiley Blackwell

Other

  1. Translation of "Do not have Pity," "Sun Serpent," "Day and Night," by Aimé Césaire, in The Norton Anthology: World Masterpieces, 7th Ed., vol. 2 (1999), pp. 1718-1719
  2. Translation of "Statue of Lafcadio Hearn", in Soleil éclaté: Melanges offerts à Aimé Césaire à l'occasion de son soixante-dixiéme anniversaire par une équipe internationale d'artistes et de chercheurs, edited by Jacqueline Leiner (1984), Gunter Narr Verlag, Tübingen

Book & Monograph Reviews

  1. Horace's Narrative Odes by Michèle Lowrie (Oxford 1997), Classical Review, vol. ns. 49 no. 1 (Spring, 1999), pp. 50-2
  2. Epic of the Dispossessed: Derek Walcott's Omeros by Robert D. Hammer (Columbia 1997), South Central Review, vol. 15 no. 2 (1998), pp. 59-61
  3. Derek Walcott's Poetry: American Mimicry by Rei Terada (Boston 1992), American Literature, vol. 69 no. 1 (1997), pp. 241
  4. “On Césaire.” Review-essay on Aimé Césaire: le nègre inconsolé by Roger Toumson and Simonne Henry-Valmore (Paris/Fort-de-France 1993); Aimé Césaire: une traversée paradoxale du siècle by Raphael Confiant (Paris 1993); Cahier d’un retour au pays natal ed. Abiola Irele, Research in African Literatures, vol. 26 no. 2 (1995), pp. 173-184
  5. Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception by Charles Martindale (Cambridge 1993), New England Classical Newsletter and Journal, vol. 20 no. 4 (1993), pp. 203-206
  6. From a Sabine Jar by L. Edmunds (Chapel Hill 1992), Classical Journal, vol. 88 no. 2 (1993), pp. 203-206
  7. Metaformations by F. Ahl (Ithaca 1985), Classical Philology, vol. 83 no. 3 (1988), pp. 260-262
  8. N.G. Davis, The Art of the Aeneid by W.S. Anderson, Comparative Literature, vol. 24 no. 1 (1972), pp. 93-4
Last modified: 2011/08/10