Darrel Janzen , Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Practice of Classics

Darrel is a scholar of ancient Greek and especially Roman literature and society, specializing in Roman literature and thought of the early Roman Empire (1st-2nd centuries CE). His research has three main focuses: the relationship between Roman space, culture, and identity; Roman environmental thought, and most recently, knowledge and ignorance as social phenomena in the Roman world. He is currently working on a book entitled ‘Seeking Solitude in Early Imperial Roman Literature from Tiberius to Hadrian', a wide-ranging study of voluntary solitude-seeking as a paradoxically social behavior of the Roman upper classes in the literature of the early Roman empire. Recent and forthcoming work has analyzed pollution in the landscapes of Lucan's epic poetry, Lucan's intertextual engagement with Virgil's Aeneid, the absent presence of enslaved people in Roman literary depictions of the solitary villa landscapes of upper-class men, social epistemology in Plautus' Poenulus and an acrostic reference to the Hebrew Bible in Virgil's Aeneid. A pair of upcoming articles will investigate Seneca's thoughts on ecology and the end of the world.
 
At Texas Tech, Darrel teaches courses on Latin and Greek language and literature, as well as courses on Classical Civilization. He has experience using communicative, spoken methods in his Latin and Greek language teaching and is interested in developing his language pedagogy further in this direction. Darrel holds a Ph.D. in Classics from Brown University and most recently taught for several years at the University of Victoria in British Columbia.

Education

• PhD, Classics, Brown University 2018
• BA, Classical Studies and History, University of British Columbia 2011

Academic Publications

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

• “A New Dimension to Faunus’ Ambiguous Prophecy: A Noah-acrostic at Aeneid 7.96-101” Classical Philology, forthcoming (co-authored with Jonathan Granirer)
• "Two Allusions in Lucan's Bellum Civile to the proem and conclusion of Vergil's Aeneid (BC 3.133-34 ~ Aen. 12.945-47 and BC 7.847-51 ~ Aen. 1.8-11)" Vergilius 69 (2023) 79-106.
• “Solastalgia, Future Memory, and Polluted Landscapes in Lucan's Bellum Civile 7” in Christopher Schliephake and Evi Zemanek (eds.) Anticipatory Environmental(Hi)Stories: Narratives of Coming Nature(s) from Antiquity to the Anthropocene. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023, 227-46.
• “Elite Solitude, Slavery, and Social Privilege at the Imperial Roman Villa” in Rafal Matuszewski (ed.) Being Alone in Antiquity: Greco-Roman Ideas and Experiences of Misanthropy, Isolation, and Solitude. De Gruyter, 2021, 71-98. 

Reviews

• Review of Fitzgerald, William and E. Spentzou (eds.) The Production of Space in Latin Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Classical Review 69.1 (Apr. 2019), 97-99. 

Select Honours and Awards

• Charles Edwin Wilbour Fellowship in Latin (2015-16)
• William Michaelides Graduate Fellowship in Greek Studies (2011-12)