Dr Paul White
- Position: Associate Professor of Classics
- Areas of expertise: Classical Latin and Neo-Latin literature, particularly poetry; Latin love elegy; comparative literature; classical reception; the classical commentary; Renaissance humanism in Europe; Classics
- Email: P.M.White@leeds.ac.uk
- Location: 2.17 Michael Sadler Building
Profile
I studied Classical Latin and French at Clare College, Cambridge, and remained at Cambridge for my Ph.D and as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow (2006-09). From 2009-13 held the posts of Research Associate, Fellow of Sidney Sussex College and Temporary Lecturer in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages, University of Cambridge. Before coming to Leeds I spent a year as research fellow at the John Rylands Research Institute, University of Manchester, working on the collections of early printed editions of the classics.
Responsibilities
- Director of Classics (Subject Lead and Programme Manager)
Research interests
My research focuses on Latin poetry and its reception, with a particular focus on Renaissance humanism. I have published articles on poetry, education, authorship and print culture in Latin and French vernacular contexts, and am the author of books on the early modern reception of Ovid’s Heroides (Columbus, 2009), on the classical editions and commentaries of the Paris-based printer and author Jodocus Badius Ascensius (Oxford, 2013), on the post-classical reception of the Roman elegist Gallus (Routledge 2019).
My current / forthcoming publications include a short monograph on early modern Latin love poetry, and a longer monograph on the genre of Latin love elegy in the European Renaissance; I am also part of the editorial team working on a translation edition of the Book of Epitomes of Hernando Colón.
Publications
Books
Early Modern Latin Love Poetry (Leiden: Brill, 2023)
Gallus Reborn: A Study of the Diffusion and Reception of Works Ascribed to Gaius Cornelius Gallus (London: Routledge, 2019)
Jodocus Badius Ascensius: Commentary, Commerce and Print in the Renaissance, British Academy Postdoctoral Monographs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)
Renaissance Postscripts: Responding to Ovid’s ‘Heroides’ in Sixteenth-Century France (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009)
Edited books
Sodalitas litteratorum: la sodalité dans la littérature néo-latine et française de la Renaissance et de l’époque moderne (1500-1675): Études à la mémoire de Philip Ford, ed. by Ingrid de Smet and Paul White (Geneva: Droz, 2019)
Method and Variation: Narrative in Early Modern French Thought, ed. by Emma Gilby and Paul White, Legenda (London: MHRA and Maney Publishing, 2013)
Masculinities in Sixteenth-Century France, ed. by Philip Ford and Paul White (Cambridge: Cambridge French Colloquia, 2006)
Translations
Henri Estienne, Nundiarum Francofordiensium encomium. Eloge de la foire de Francfort. Ein Lob auf die Frankfurter Messe. Encomium of the Frankfurt Fair, ed. Elsa Kammerer (Geneva: Droz, 2017)
Articles & Chapters
‘Uses of Commentary Editions of the Latin Classics in the Renaissance: The Horace Editions of Jodocus Badius Ascensius’, in: La edición de los clásicos latinos en el Renacimiento: textos, contextos y herencia cultural, ed. by Antonio Moreno Hernández and Juan Miguel Valero Moreno (Madrid: Ediciones Complutense, 2023)
‘The Poetics of Nothing: Jean Passerat’s “De Nihilo” and its Legacy’, Erudition and the Republic of Letters 5 (2020), 237-273
‘Continuity and Rupture: Comparative Literature and the Latin Tradition’, Comparative Critical Studies 17.3 (2020), 373-389
‘Neo-Latin Love Elegy: Joachim Du Bellay, Amores’, in: An Anthology of European Neo-Latin Literature, ed. by Gesine Manuwald, Daniel Hadas & Lucy R. Nicholas (London: Bloomsbury, 2020)
'The Classical Commentary in Renaissance France: Bilingual, Mixed-Language and Translated Editions', Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme 41.3 (2018)
‘Ronsard’s Continuation des Amours (1555) in dialogue with Muret’s Elegiae (1552)’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 79.1 (2017)
‘Reading Horace in 1490s Padua: Willibald Pirckheimer, Joannes Calphurnius, Raphael Regius’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 23.2 (2016), 85-107
‘France’ in: Oxford Handbook of Neo-Latin, ed. by Sarah Knight and Stephan Tilg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 411-425
‘Marketing Adaptations of the Ship of Fools’ in: Translation and the Book Trade in Early Modern Europe, ed. by José María Pérez Fernández & Edward Wilson-Lee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 22-39
‘From Commentary to Translation: Figurative Representations of the Text in the French Renaissance’, in: The Culture of Translation in Early Modern England and France, 1500-1660, ed. by Tania Demetriou and Rowan Tomlinson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 71-85
‘Humanist Printers’ in: Philip Ford, Jan Bloemendal and Charles Fantazzi (eds.), Brill’s Encyclopaedia of the Neo-Latin World, vol. 1: Macropaedia (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 173-184
‘Poetic genres—Heroides’, ‘Printing Centres—Basel’, ‘Estienne Family’, ‘Printing Centres—Geneva’, ‘Printing Centres—Paris’, ‘Printing Centres—Strasbourg’ in: Philip Ford, Jan Bloemendal and Charles Fantazzi (eds.), Brill’s Encyclopaedia of the Neo-Latin World, vol. 2: Micropaedia (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 1141-2, 1154-7, 1161-4
‘Representation and Illusion in the Elegies of Théodore de Bèze’ in: French Studies 66 (2012), 1-11
‘Foolish Pleasures: The Stultiferae naves of Jodocus Badius Ascensius and the Poetry of Filippo Beroaldo the Elder’ in: Humanistica Lovaniensia LX (2011), 65-83
‘Ovid’s Heroides in Early Modern French Translation: Saint-Gelais, Fontaine, Du Bellay’ in: Translation and Literature 13.2 (2004), 165-80
<h4>Research projects</h4> <p>Any research projects I'm currently working on will be listed below. Our list of all <a href="https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/dir/research-projects">research projects</a> allows you to view and search the full list of projects in the faculty.</p>Professional memberships
- Fellow of the HEA
Student education
I teach modules on Roman literature, comparative and reception topics, and Latin language.
Research groups and institutes
- Classics
- Comparative Literature
- French
- Classics
- Heritage
- Literary studies
- Centre for World Literatures