Dr. Josiah Osgood
Professor
Office: 320 Healy Hall
ph: 202.687.7102
email: jo39@georgetown.edu
Download Prof. Osgood's full cv here.
Education:
B.A., Yale University
M.A., Yale University
Ph.D., Yale University
Teaching & Research Areas:
Roman history, especially of the late Republic and early Empire
Latin literatureAbout Professor Osgood:
My teaching and research cover many areas of Roman history and Latin literature, with a special focus on the late Roman Republic and early empire. My first book, Caesar's Legacy: Civil War and the Emergence of the Roman Empire (Cambridge, 2006), explored the civil war that followed the assassination of Julius Caesar and the way it was treated in contemporary literature; more recently, Claudius Caesar: Image and Power in the Early Roman Empire (Cambridge, 2011) reassesses the development of monarchical rule at Rome in the first century AD. In a series of articles and reviews I have been exploring Julius Caesar's career as well as family life and education in ancient Rome, and in years to come will be looking more at the history of Roman women. I enjoy teaching Latin at all levels; favorite authors include Cicero, Caesar, Tacitus, and Suetonius. In 2011 my textbook A Suetonius Reader was published in the Bolchazy-Carducci Latin Readers series. Each year in collaboration with Georgetown's Office of International Programs I lead a two-week study tour in Rome and I love traveling elsewhere in the former Roman empire.
Recent Courses:
CLSL 244: Tacitus' Annals
CLSL 255: Latin Prose: Reading and Writing
CLSL 235: Latin Letters
CLSS 241: The Age of Augustus
CLSS 225: The Ancient City of Rome
Current Research:
I have recently turned to an in-depth study of Roman women, looking especially at their right to hold property, and the power this afforded them. Some of this work will appear in my forthcoming book Turia: a Roman Woman's Civil War (under contract with Oxford University Press). Also in progress is a new edition of Suetonius' life of the emperor Augustus and a short thematic survey of the fall of the Roman Republic. In years to come, I hope to work more on the development of biographical writing in antiquity and on the city of Rome.
Recent Publications:
My new book, Claudius Caesar: Image and Power in the Early Roman Empire appeared in 2011 with Cambridge University Press. Here is the blurb:
The story of Claudius has been often told before. Ancient writers saw the emperor as the dupe of his wives and palace insiders; Robert Graves tried to rehabilitate him as a far shrewder, if still frustrated, politician. Josiah Osgood shifts the focus off the personality of Claudius and on to what his tumultuous years in power reveal about the developing political culture of the early Roman Empire. What precedents set by Augustus were followed? What had to be abandoned? How could a new emperor win the support of key elements of Roman society? This richly illustrated discussion draws on a range of newly discovered documents, exploring events that move far beyond the city of Rome and Italy to Egypt and Judea, Morocco and Britain. Claudius Caesar opens up a new perspective not just on Claudius himself, but all Roman emperors, the Roman Empire, and the nature of empires more generally.
Other recently published work includes a book chapter "The Education of Paulinus of Pella: Learning in the Late Empire" in an edited collection, From the Tetrarchs to the Theodosians; a book chapter on how the family functioned as a socializing force in Roman society for The Oxford Handbook of Social Relations in the Roman World; an article for Greece and Rome entitled "Caesar and the Pirates; or How to Make (and Break) an Ancient Life." I have also submitted for publication a paper on the Roman historian Appian that I delivered at a conference at the University of Sydney in Australia in 2010.
