James Calvin Taylor

I am an Assistant Professor at Colby College and recently completed my doctorate at Harvard University with a dissertation titled “Plumbing the depths: geological processes, deep time, and the shaping of landscapes in classical literature.”  My dissertation investigates how the observation of geological processes led classical authors to imagine much deeper timescales than those made possible by the shallow reach of recorded history and collective memory. Its central argument is that this deeper, geologic time exercised a disruptive influence within classical thought, in so far as its vast timescales completely dwarfed the narrow bounds of a human life or even of a community’s existence. As a consequence, its existence raised several problems for Greek and Roman authors, such as how old the Earth was and whether its existence and that of humanity were more or less coextensive; why the collective memory of a community, or humanity as a whole, was so shallow; how much influence geological processes exerted over human history; and whether the radically different scales of geologic time and human existence could be integrated into coherent narratives or the vast dimensions of the former would always minimize the significance or agency of the human subject. Authors whose extended grappling with such questions receives particular attention include Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid, Strabo, Seneca the Younger, and Pliny the Elder. In analyzing these texts, I adopt the ecocritical model of mutual constructionism, according to which nature and culture ceaselessly reshape each other. Under this lens any literary representation of an environment becomes a complex negotiation between the self-referential literary tradition in which the text is implicated and the extratextual physical environments that the text purports to represent. To capture this interplay fully, I integrate archaeological and historical approaches to the environments of the ancient Mediterranean into my analysis of classical literature and philosophy.

This project grew out of an interest in the cultural and metapoetic significance of landscapes in Latin literature that developed during my undergraduate studies at Corpus Christi College, Oxford and MPhil at Hughes Hall, Cambridge. My MPhil thesis explored the symbolic associations of umbra in Virgil’s Eclogues with poetic otium and the preceding literary tradition, and used this polysemous shade as a model for reading the collection as a dual meditation on the anxiety of influence and anxieties surrounding poetry’s marginalized place in Roman culture.
Address: Clinton, NY, United States