Brian Krostenko

Research Interest: Rhetoric and Linguistics of the Late Roman Republic

Frequently Teaches: Reading and Writing Latin Prose; Cicero

Krostenko’s research centers on the culture and law of the Late Roman Republic, Cicero, Catullus, rhetoric, and Latin linguistics. He is the author of Cicero, Catullus, and the Language of Social Performance (Chicago, 2001), which discusses the problem of aestheticism in Roman culture by means of historical semantics. He is also the author of The Voices of the Consul: The Rhetorics of Cicero's de lege agraria I and II (Oxford, 2024), the first book-length study of the rhetoric of those speeches, which uses the techniques of discourse analysis to reveal how and why Cicero lays claim to contested political slogans and ideologies in the turbulent late Republic. The book argues that Cicero reads the details of a land law not narrowly, as a legislative proposal aimed at a particular set of problems (which it was), but broadly, as a kind of charter for government (which, in part, it also was). Krostenko regularly teaches Latin Survey I, the History of Latin ("From Ennius to Egeria"), and Latin Prose Composition.

CV