John M. Oksanish

John M. Oksanish
Associate Professor (2011)
BA, MAT, Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst; PhD, Yale
Office Location: Tribble C307
Contact: (336) 758-5330; oksanijm@wfu.edu 

John Oksanish holds degrees in Classics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (B.A., M.A.T.) and Yale (M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D). Prior to pursuing the Ph.D., he worked for HarperCollins Publishers in New York and taught secondary school Latin (Walpole, Mass.). He regularly teaches courses in Epic, Latin Historiography, Latin Epistolography, and the CLA seminar on Cicero. A dyed-in-the-wool New Englander of Eastern European and Québécois extraction (inter alia), he has come to view a spring in the Carolina Piedmont as a (more or less) fair trade for autumn in western Mass.  Dr. Oksanish specializes in the prose literature of the late Republic and early Empire, though he has published research on topics ranging from Vergil’s pastoral poems to “universal” historiography. He is especially interested in ancient notions of expertise and authority in civic life.  His book, currently under contract with Oxford University Press (working title: Vitruvian Men), examines Vitruvius’s De architectura and its ethos of commemorative expertise within the context of Augustan literature and culture; this research has been directly funded by the NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) and the WFU Humanities Institute, which also receives NEH funding.