2025
New ISSN for Ovidius!
Ovidius: Journal of the International Ovidian Society has a new ISSN number: 3068-9856. Follow this link to access the journal’s website: https://ovidiusjournal.org/ojs/index.php/ovidius/index.
2024
Graduate Student Paper Prize
The International Ovidian Society announces its W.S. Anderson Graduate Student Paper Prize, to be awarded each year to the pre-doctoral author of the best paper about Ovid and/or his reception submitted to the Selection Committee. Anyone may nominate papers, and self-nominations are strongly encouraged. Submitted papers must be scripts of 15- to 30-minute oral presentations delivered at academic conferences or meetings that took place in the academic year prior to the award. Any paper delivered between September 1, 2023 and August 31, 2024 will be eligible for this year’s award. The submission deadline is November 15, 2024.
Submissions should include (in an email): 1) The presenter’s name, affiliation, and email address; 2) brief details about the conference submission; and 3) an attached copy of the paper and attendant handout or PowerPoint presentation. Neither the paper nor any other supporting documents should contain any information that would identify the author. Papers may be submitted in any language. Submissions will be reviewed blind by a joint committee of faculty and graduate students. The award will be presented at the Business Meeting of the IOS during the SCS convention in January 2025.
Send submissions any time until November 15, 2024 to Daniel Libatique at dlibatique@fairfield.edu. Please direct questions to the IOS Graduate Liaison, Erica Krause, at enk9tj@virginia.edu.
Launch of Ovidius (March 19, 2024)
IOS is pleased to announce the launch of Ovidius, Journal of the International Ovidian Society: http://ovidiusjournal.org/. It is the first journal wholly devoted to scholarship on the Latin poet Ovid, as well as the many afterlives of his work.
Ovidius eagerly welcomes contributions on any aspect of Ovid’s poetry or Ovidian studies more broadly, and the full range of Ovidian receptions and influences, literary and otherwise, from any methodological approach. The journal also accepts translations and pieces of original creative writing with an Ovidian theme, and especially welcomes contributions — of any sort — that are innovative, or which come from junior and historically underrepresented scholars.
2023
Sharon James
The IOS mourns the sudden and untimely passing of our friend and colleague Professor Sharon James on December 28th, 2023. A founding member of the Society, Sharon was an invaluable participant in its activities and plans for the future throughout.
Her path-breaking work on Ovid has been and will continue to be an inspiration to successive generations of scholars.
Our thoughts are with her husband, Corry Arnold, and her family.
2019
Ellen Oliensis receives the 2021 Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit from the Society for Classical Studies
Ellen Oliensis, Klio Distinguished Professor of Classical Languages and Literature, and Professor of Ancient Greek & Roman Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley has received the 2021 Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit from the Society for Classical Studies for her monograph, Loving writing/Ovid’s Amores (Cambridge University Press, 2019). See here for the citation praising her book on the SCS website.
The IOS asked Professor Oliensis to share some of her thoughts on her award-winning volume.
Q: Congratulations on receiving this prestigious award! What is the major premise of your monograph?
A: I think the major premise is that the Amores features a single character, a lover who is also a poet (I call him “Naso”), and that there is constant interference between this character’s writing life and his love life. So what I am offering is a complement or alternative to the prevailing approaches to the collection, which tend to emphasize one dimension of the speaker at the expense of the other.
Q: What, as you see it, is the most fruitful result of this line of analysis?
A: Resisting the bifurcation of Naso opens up many new interpretive possibilities. I start off by focusing on the seamy emotions that percolate through Naso’s most “poetic” performances. One way I get at these emotions is by reading poems in sequence; for example, reading Amores 3.15 with 3.14 brings out the aggressive contrastive stress that elevates Naso-the-immortal-poet at the expense of his worldly and promiscuous girlfriend.
Then in the second half of the book I reverse course and experiment with taking Naso’s desire seriously, exploring its kinship with masochism, both the specific profile associated with Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and the generalized account, originary masochism, developed by Jean Laplanche. This double movement across the two halves of the book is fundamental to my argument because it shows, first from one side and then from the other, the absolute entanglement of desire and writing. This is why, though I start the book by drawing a very sharp distinction between Naso and Ovid, I end by bringing them back together.
Q: What inspired you to approach Naso (Ovid) in this way?
A: I think it was my own pleasure in reading the Amores, coupled with my sense that the existing scholarship, however insightful and persuasive, did not overlap very much with my own experience of the collection. So, I felt the need to write a book that would capture and convey that experience.