Center for the Study of the Early Modern World

Michael Putnam joined the Brown faculty in 1960 after teaching for a year at Smith College. He was Acting Director of the Center for Hellenic Studies in 1961-62 and served as one of its Senior Fellows from 1971 to 1986. In 1963-64 he held a Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome where he was later a Resident (1970) and Mellon Professor in Charge of the Classical School (1989-91). Since 1991 he has been a Trustee of the Academy and a Life Trustee since 2010. He received its Centennial Medal in 2009 and Trustees’ Medal in 2010.

He was elected a director of the American Philological Association in 1972 and has since served the Association as President (1982), delegate to the American Council of Learned Societies (1984-87), and Financial Trustee (1997-2004), as a member of its Development Committee (1995-) and as co-chair of its Gateway Campaign Committee (2005-12). He received the Association’s Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit in 1971 and its Distinguished Service Award in 2013. In 1985 he was Townsend Professor at Cornell University and inaugurated the Townsend Lectures. For 1987-88 he was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study and for 1994-95 a Visiting Scholar for Phi Beta Kappa. During the spring of 2004 he gave the Martin Classical Lectures at Oberlin College and in 2009 inaugurated the Amsterdam Virgil Lectures at the University of Amsterdam. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Member of the American Philosophical Society, and has received Guggenheim, ACLS and NEH Fellowships. He is a member of Italy’s Accademia Nazionale Virgiliana. From 1967 to 1987 he was Sole Trustee of the Lowell Observatory, Flagstaff, Arizona, and is currently a member of its Board of Advisors. Since 1997 he has served as a member of the Selections Committee of the Fogg Museum of Art, Harvard University. He served as trustee of Bay Chamber Concerts from 1972 to 1988 and from 2010 to 2016. From 2013 to 2016 he was Trustee of the Vergilian Society of America from which he received the Alexander G. McKay Prize in 2009. He is a member of the editorial boards of Arion and Vergilius.

Putnam’s primary interest is in Latin literature and its influence with a speciality in the poetry of Republican and Augustan Rome. His books include The Poetry of the Aeneid (Harvard University Press, 1965); Virgil’s Pastoral Art: Studies in the Eclogues (Princeton University Press, 1970); Tibullus: A Commentary (University of Oklahoma Press, 1973); Virgil’s Poem of the Earth (Princeton University Press, 1979); Essays on Latin Lyric, Elegy, and Epic (Princeton University Press, 1982); Artifices of Eternity: Horace’s Fourth Book of Odes (Cornell University Press, 1986); Virgil’s Aeneid: Interpretation and Influence (University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Virgil’s Epic Designs: Ekphrasis in the Aeneid (Yale University Press, 1998); Horace’s "Carmen Saeculare": Ritual Magic and the Poet’s Art (Yale University Press, 2000), Maffeo Vegio: Short Epics (Harvard University Press, 2004); Poetic Interplay: Catullus and Horace (Princeton University Press, 2006); The Virgilian Tradition: The First Fifteen Hundred Years, coedited with Jan Ziolkowski (Yale University Press, 2008); Jacopo Sannazaro: The Latin Poetry (Harvard University Press, 2009); A Companion to Virgil’s Aeneid and its Tradition, co-edited with Joseph Farrell (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); The Humanness of Heroes: Studies in the Conclusion of Virgil’s Aeneid (Amsterdam University Press, 2011); and (with Rodney Dennis) The Complete Poems of Tibullus: An En Face Bilingual Edition (University of California Press, 2012). He is the author of numerous articles and reviews.

At Brown, as well as chairing the Department of Classics for several periods, he was also a member of the Comparative Literature faculty as well as of the Committee on Renaissance and Early Modern Studies. In 2003 he received the University’s John Rowe Workman Award for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities.