Katharina Volk is a Professor of Classics and recipient of the Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award (2010-11). She holds an M.A. from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich (1994), a Ph.D. from Princeton University (1999), and has been teaching at Columbia since 2002. She is the author of The Poetics of Latin Didactic: Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, Manilius (Oxford 2002) and Manilius and his Intellectual Background (Oxford 2009), for which she received the Lionel Trilling Book Award (2010). She is the editor of Callida Musa: Papers on Latin Literature in Honor of R. Elaine Fantham (with J. Mira Seo and Rolando Ferri, Pisa 2009), Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Vergil's Eclogues (Oxford 2008), Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Vergil's Georgics (Oxford 2008), and Seeing Seneca Whole: Perspectives on Philosophy, Poetry and Politics (with Gareth D. Williams, Leiden 2006). Her articles range from Homeric formula and Hesiodic poetics to Vergilian eroticism, Ovidian time, Senecan dramaturgy, and beyond.

Professor Volk's latest books are Ovid, an introduction to the work of her favorite Latin poet (Malden, MA 2010), and Forgotten Stars: Rediscovering Manilius' Astronomica, a volume co-edited with Steven J. Green and based on a conference on Manilius that took place at Columbia in 2008 (Oxford 2011). She is currently in the process of editing, together with Gareth D. Williams, a volume called Roman Reflections: Essay on Latin Philosophy, which is based on a 2012 Columbia conference and will appear with Oxford University Press. Professor Volk's latest research project, which she expects will keep her busy for many years, concerns the politics and sociology of knowledge in late Republican Rome.