Cat Lambert

Overview

My research focuses on how readers both ancient and modern defamiliarize our assumptions as scholars about how to read texts and help us imagine new modes of reading (and doing other things with) texts. I pursue this research by roving promiscuously across ancient Greek and Latin literature and putting ancient texts into conversation with the methods of book history, queer theory, and reception studies.  

Ever since going down the wormhole to find out what the ancients thought about “the entomological bookworm,” I have become oriented towards “bad reading” not as something to worry about but as something to learn from. My first book, Bad Readers and Ancient Rome (forthcoming with Oxford University Press), argues that the cultural category of the “bad reader” helps us tell a different story about reading culture in the imperial Roman world and challenges what we think we know about reading today. Searching for “bad readers” across the works of Seneca the Younger, Plutarch, Martial, and Lucian (among others) generates three key insights. It illuminates the kinds of readers and practices often marginalized or dismissed in scholarly accounts of reading in antiquity. It shows that “bad reading” is a moving target: “bad reading” in one (literary, social, or historical) context might be “good reading” in another. And it reveals that “bad reading” is more than a matter of misreading or misinterpretation: “bad reading” is a politically and socially charged practice, a performance that taps into élite Roman anxieties about masculinity, cultural identity, and social status. Ultimately, my book shows how we might generate new interpretations of classical literature by taking our cue from “bad readers” ourselves. 

Another major strain of my research has to do with what we might consider “queer attachments” to texts. What happens when texts fall into the hands of “wrong” or unintended readers? How do readers forge affective attachments to texts that transmit harmful histories or are cause for shame, that seem inhospitable to queer desires, that might better be kept at arm’s length? What is the political potential of these perverse attachments to unlikely texts?

These are questions that thread throughout the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and that I explore in a new research project about the perverse, queer relations Sedgwick forged between a book that puts classical antiquity to racist, homophobic ends—Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s (1834) Last Days of Pompeii—and one of her favorite poets, the homosexual C. P. Cavafy.   

I have taught Classics in a variety of contexts, including a one-year gig at Eton College, where I also coached boys' rugby. I am also a member of the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography.

Research Focus

Latin and Greek literature; ancient reading cultures; book history; gender and sexuality studies; queer theory; classical reception studies