Joseph Solodow was educated at Columbia and Harvard. He taught at Columbia, Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA, and several other universities before being appointed Professor of Foreign Languages at Southern Connecticut State University, where he now teaches the Spanish language and Spanish-American literature along with Latin. In 1980-81 he held a Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. Since becoming associated with the Yale Department of Classics in 1985, he has given a number of courses, such as the history of Latin literature, Virgil, and Ovid.
His research interests lie in Latin literature and philology and in ancient historiography--more particularly in Catullus, the Augustan poets and Livy, Latin prose style, and the history of the language, all the way to its Romance descendants. He considers his forte to be the use of philology as a tool of literary criticism. His teaching, which ranges more widely, includes western literature read in translation.
His major publications are The Latin Particle Quidem and The World of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Cato the Elder, Catullus, the Eclogues, the Ars Amatoria, Livy, and Castiglione have figured as the subjects of articles. The Modern Language Association awarded the Scaglione Translation Prize to his rendering of G. B. Conte's history of Latin literature into English. At the moment he is finishing a book on the survival of Latin in the Romance languages and English.
