About

Christina Kraus is the Thomas A. Thacher Professor of Latin at Yale University and serves as the Director of Graduate Studies. She holds a BA from Princeton University and a PhD from Harvard University. Prior to her appointment at Yale in 2004, she taught at NYU, UCL, and Oxford. Her research interests encompass ancient historiography, Latin prose style, and the theory and practice of commentaries, with particular focus on Latin historiography, historical narrative, and the works of Caesar, Livy, and Tacitus. Kraus is also a member of the Program in Early Modern Studies and has been involved in various projects and editorial boards related to Roman historiography and ancient texts. She gave the 2009 Martin Classical Lectures at Oberlin College on Tacitean polyphonies and is working on a project concerning early modern commentaries on Ennius’ Annales.

Research topics

• Art
• Philosophy
• Visual arts
• Art history
• Literature
• Classics

Selected publications

• VIEWS ON STUDYING LATIN LITERATURE - Roy Gibson / Christopher Whitton (edd.), The Cambridge Critical Guide to Latin Literature. Pp. xviii + 927, colour fig., b/w & colour ills. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024. Cased, £150, US$195. ISBN: 978-1-108-42108-9.

  The Classical Review · 2025-12-02

  article1st authorCorresponding

  VIEWS ON STUDYING LATIN LITERATURE - Roy Gibson / Christopher Whitton (edd.), The Cambridge Critical Guide to Latin Literature. Pp. xviii + 927, colour fig., b/w & colour ills. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024. Cased, £150, US$195. ISBN: 978-1-108-42108-9.

  PublisherDOI

• Going in Circles: Digressive Behavior in Caesar, BC 2.23–44

  De Gruyter eBooks · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Art history
  • Visual arts

  Caesar's commentarii contain ekphrastic elaborations of engineering or topography which invite discussion of the balance and composition of their surrounding historiographical narratives. Caesar's style may march along as do his soldiers, but locilike the Gallo-Germanic ethnography in BG6 or the tower at Massilia in BC2 allow that legion to throw down its packs and take up a different rhythm. How stable is the traditional binary of "primary" text and digression? In attempting to shed some light on these questions as they apply to Caesar's extant writing, this essay examines the story of Curio in North Africa (BC2.23-44), in which Galen Rowe identified a circular, "tragic" plotting. But circularity is at home in digressive structures as well, notably at their framing points, which are often marked with ring composition. So the "road" of historiography makes its own circles and detours on its way down a chronological path. I read Caesar's distinctive Curio narrative as both digressive and integral to the rest of the commentarii, understanding its textual geography and plotting as supplementary - both addition and challenge - to Caesar's primary authorial perspective and voice. I conclude that Curio's story finds Caesar telling a tragic tale set as a miseenabymewithin his "primary" commentariusdiscourse, offering us different understandings of Rome's North African history.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• ‘Pointing the Moral’ or ‘Adorning the Tale?’ Illustrations and Commentary on Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum in 19th and Early 20thcentury American Textbooks

  De Gruyter eBooks · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Literature
  • Art
  • Classics

  ‘Pointing the Moral’ or ‘Adorning the Tale?’ Illustrations and Commentary on Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum in 19th and Early 20thcentury American Textbooks was published in Classical Scholarship and Its History on page 249.

  PublisherDOI

• Livy’s Faliscan Schoolmaster

  BRILL eBooks · 2021 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Philosophy
  PublisherDOI

• <i>Commenting on the</i>Annals<i>: Steuart, Skutsch, and Ennius</i>

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2020-04-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This paper considers the various approaches one might take to commenting on a text as fragmentary as the Annals. I begin with some general remarks about fragments and look at their specific implications for Ennius. I then focus on some details from the two English language commentaries on the Annals to date, those of Otto Skutsch and his precursor, Ethel Mary Steuart. Comparing sample notes and larger structures in the two commentaries, showing how both commentators were seduced – to varying degrees – by a desire for completeness and copia, and how the poems that emerge from these commentaries differ. Though Steuart was rigorously trained in the same basic stable as Skutsch, her work is too far inferior – in accuracy and in sophistication of methodology – to his and to other available editions of the Annals to stand up against them. But it is also the work of a learned scholar with a different voice and a heterodox vision of the poem, a useful presence in a world where Skutsch's Ennius may no longer be our Ennius.

  PublisherDOI

• Works cited

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2018-07-04

  book-chapterSenior author

  The first work of any great historian has always commanded attention, and Tacitus was ancient Rome's very greatest historian. His biography of his father-in-law, governor of Britain in the years AD 77–84, is a literary masterpiece: it combines penetrating political history with gripping military narrative and throughout poses the question (still very much alive today) of how one should live one's life under a tyranny. This is the first commentary in English on the Agricola for almost half a century: in keeping with the aims of the series, particular attention is paid to the understanding of Tacitus' Latin, but a whole range of generic, historical, textual and narrative topics is covered, and it will be suitable for advanced undergraduates and graduate students as well as scholars. Tacitus' Agricola remains a key text for anyone with an interest in Roman Britain as well as ancient biography.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2018-07-19

  bookSenior author

  The introductory chapter considers the discipline of classical literature as a field in tension between canonization and marginality. On the one hand, it devotes particular attention to the role played by reception studies, the classical tradition, and their more recent declinations. On the other hand, it discusses the implications of the particular disciplinary constellation of classics for an academic career and for the academic profession, which are differently organized in continental Europe and in the Anglo-American world. The main concern here is not to discuss or contest the idea of canon in itself—its various cultural, ideological, and political implications, as explored for instance in postcolonial studies—but rather to explore canonicity as an invisible, yet nonetheless ruling principle within the disciplinary discourse and scholarly practice of classics.

  PublisherDOI

• Marginality, Canonicity, Passion

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2018-07-19 · 56 citations

  bookSenior author

  In recent years the discipline of classics has been experiencing a profound transformation, which affects not only methodologies and hermeneutic practices (i.e. <italic>how</italic> classicists read and interpret ancient literature) but also, and more importantly, the objects of study themselves (i.e. <italic>what</italic> they read and interpret). One of the most important factors has been the establishment of reception studies. The reception of classical literature and culture in later ages and/or in non-western cultures considerably expands the field. This temporal and cultural expansion has had many salutary effects. But reception studies has focused almost exclusively on the most canonical Greek and Latin texts, not only because they are valued per se but also because they have been received, rewritten, adapted, discussed, and alluded to on such a scale as to discourage discussion of other ancient texts, which were rarely or never the objects of significant reception. By definition, reception studies is uninterested in texts that have had no ‘success’ and thus, implicitly adopting canonicity as an unspoken criterion, it de facto marginalizes those ancient texts that were not blessed with a significant <italic>Nachleben</italic>. This volume is not a discussion of what is central, what is marginal, and why. Nor are we interested in exploring the powerful and complex connections between canonicity and, say, religion, politics, and power more generally. Rather, this volume aims at unveiling the many subtle implications of canonicity and marginality within the discipline, both at a theoretical and at a practical level.

  PublisherDOI

• Preface

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2018-07-04

  book-chapterSenior author

  The first work of any great historian has always commanded attention, and Tacitus was ancient Rome's very greatest historian. His biography of his father-in-law, governor of Britain in the years AD 77–84, is a literary masterpiece: it combines penetrating political history with gripping military narrative and throughout poses the question (still very much alive today) of how one should live one's life under a tyranny. This is the first commentary in English on the Agricola for almost half a century: in keeping with the aims of the series, particular attention is paid to the understanding of Tacitus' Latin, but a whole range of generic, historical, textual and narrative topics is covered, and it will be suitable for advanced undergraduates and graduate students as well as scholars. Tacitus' Agricola remains a key text for anyone with an interest in Roman Britain as well as ancient biography.

  PublisherDOI

• Appendixes

  2018-07-04

  otherSenior author

  The first work of any great historian has always commanded attention, and Tacitus was ancient Rome's very greatest historian. His biography of his father-in-law, governor of Britain in the years AD 77–84, is a literary masterpiece: it combines penetrating political history with gripping military narrative and throughout poses the question (still very much alive today) of how one should live one's life under a tyranny. This is the first commentary in English on the Agricola for almost half a century: in keeping with the aims of the series, particular attention is paid to the understanding of Tacitus' Latin, but a whole range of generic, historical, textual and narrative topics is covered, and it will be suitable for advanced undergraduates and graduate students as well as scholars. Tacitus' Agricola remains a key text for anyone with an interest in Roman Britain as well as ancient biography.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Marco Formisano

  32 shared

• Emily Greenwood

  16 shared

• Brooke Holmes

  University of Pittsburgh

  16 shared

• Serafina Cuomo

  16 shared

• Pauline Leven

  16 shared

• Alessandro Barchiesi

  16 shared

• Emma Buckley

  University of St Andrews

  16 shared

• Irene Peirano Garrison

  16 shared

Awards & honors

• Martin Classical Lectures at Oberlin College (2009)