Craig Williams

Craig Williams (BA Yale 1986, MA and MPhil Yale 1990, PhD Yale 1992) is the author of Roman Homosexuality (Oxford University Press 1999; revised edition 2010), a commentary on Book 2 of Martial’s epigrams (Oxford University Press 2004), A Martial Reader (Bolchazy-Carducci 2011), Reading Roman Friendship (Cambridge University Press 2012), and numerous articles and reviews on Latin literature and Roman culture and their reception. Before coming to Illinois, Williams was on the faculty of Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of CUNY for many years. He has also taught at the Freie Universität Berlin and Columbia University, and he has several times been a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, researching in Berlin at both the Humboldt-Universität and the Freie Universität. Williams' research and teaching interests include: gender and sexuality in ancient Greek and Latin literature; friendship in Latin literature and epigraphy; animals and desire in Greek and Latin literature; Greek and Latin epigram; Native American writing on Greco-Roman antiquity.

In his current book project, Whose Antiquity? Native Writers of North America on Ancient Greece and Rome, Williams brings together for the first time over eighty Indigenous writers of North America who have made various uses of Greco-Roman antiquity, writing in a range of genres from the seventeenth century to today. Many of them have invoked the “classical” antiquity of Euro-American culture in order to talk back to narratives of Native barbarism or savagery, and all of them have in one way or another contributed to Indigenous survivance. In support of this project, Williams has been awarded fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany), the Morphomata Center for Advanced Study at the University of Cologne (Germany), the U of I Center for Advanced Study, the Humanities Council and Department of Classics at Princeton University (Whitney J. Oates Fellowship), and the National Endowment for the Humanities.