| Michèle Lowrie | |
| Alma Mater: | Yale University (BA, 1984); Harvard University (PhD, 1990) |
| Occupation: | Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Service Professor, Classics and the College |
| Discipline: | Classics |
| Workplaces: | University of Chicago |
Michèle Lowrie is the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Service [1] Professor of Classics and the college at the University of Chicago. She is a specialist in Roman literature and political thought.
Lowrie completed a bachelor's degree at Yale University in 1984, followed by a PhD at Harvard University in 1990.[2] Her doctoral thesis was entitled 'Horace's Lyric Exempla' and she was supervised by Richard Tarrant.[3]
Lowrie began teaching at New York University in 1990 after the completion of her doctorate, as Assistant and Associate Professor of Classics.[4] She was awarded a Presidential Fellowship by the university while writing her first monograph, Horace's Narrative Odes.
During the period of 2000–2001, she was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton[5] and held the Burkhardt Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. This was while she was working on Writing, Performance, and Authority in Augustan Rome (published 2009).[6] In late 2005, she held a visiting research professorship at the Warburg-Haus in Hamburg.[7]
She moved to the University of Chicago in 2009. She held a fellowship at the Research Center for Cultural Theory and Theory of the Political Imaginary at the Universität Konstanz in 2010–11, and visited the Center for Advanced Studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich in 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2018 to collaborate with Barbara Vinken on a book entitled Civil War and the Collapse of the Social Bond: The Roman Tradition at the Heart of the Modern, which came out in 2022.[8] [9]
Lowrie was granted a Loeb Classical Library fellowship and made the Dirk Ippen Fellow for spring 2016 at the American Academy in Berlin, while working on a project entitled 'Safety, Security, and Salvation in Roman Political Thought,' which explored the Roman origins of concepts like national security or emergency and their relationships with societal values.[10] [11] She also gave the J.H. Gray Lectures at the University of Cambridge in 2018.
While completing her book project on security as a Roman metaphor, Lowrie was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in the 2018-19 cycle,[12] during which she also held an Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship at St. Aidan's College, Durham University in spring 2019.