Grant Nelsestuen
Credentials: University of Texas at Austin, Ph.D. '08
Position title: Associate Dean for Arts and Humanities, College of Letters & Science; Professor of Classics
Email: nelsestuen@wisc.edu
Phone: 608-265-5910
Address:
908 Van Hise Hall
Research Interests
Roman cultural history, Latin literature, ancient Greek and Roman political thought, Late Hellenistic intellectual history
Grant Nelsestuen’s research focuses on Roman political thought and cultural history, late Hellenistic intellectual history, and the literature of the late republic and early empire. His first monograph, Varro the Agronomist: Political Philosophy, Satire, and Agriculture in the Late Republic (OSUP, 2015; BMCR review here), offered a new way of reading De Re Rustica, the farming manual of M. Terentius Varro, as a hybridized work of philosophy, satire, and technical treatise, which enabled its author to allegorize Rome’s empire on the model of an agricultural estate and to offer up a rudimentary theory of imperialism. Grant has also published articles on Cicero, Cornelius Nepos, Vergil, Polybius, Xenophon, and Dicaearchus of Messana. Currently, he is working on a monographs on T. Pomponius Atticus, whose “apolitical” status arguably facilitated his central role in the political, social, and literary life of late Republican Rome. Grant teaches courses on Latin literature, Roman culture and politics, conspiracies in the ancient and modern worlds, and “friendship” as a philosophical, political, social, and scientific phenomenon throughout time and across cultures.