Dr Tom Baarda

I work at the intersection of literature and history, with a particular focus on the poetry of the Roman republic. My interests include: empire; enslavement; embodiment and flesh; translation both ancient and modern; postcolonial literature; poetic form and metre; hymns; literary fragments; the ‘affordances’ of literature, or what people do with literature. I draw both on text-critical approaches and on the insights of critical theory.

My first book, Empire and Poetry in the Roman Republic, is under contract with Cambridge University Press in the Cambridge Classical Studies series. Based on my PhD thesis (Cambridge, 2025), the book rethinks the interface between poetry and empire in the Roman republic. I identify a new paradigm for understanding Roman responses to imperial expansion, and offer detailed readings of Lucilius and Catullus with a focus on how their poetic innovation offered new ways of self-positioning within the Roman elite.

A new project, on the poetics of branding and tattooing, explores the more violent, dangerous, painful, embodied, exploitative uses that Roman poetry could be put to.

I have given papers on the poetry and history of the Roman republic in Cambridge, Munich, Rome, Grenoble, Durham, and Maynooth.

In September 2025 I was the co-organiser (with Ingo Gildenhard) of the international workshop “Affordances of Empire in Republican Rome: Literary and Historical Perspectives”.

Together with Bill Freeman I am planning the 2027 Laurence Seminar (Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge) on “The Unconnected Empire: Distance and Displacement in Roman Literature”.