Claire Bubb received her A.B. in Classics: Greek and Latin from Brown University and her Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Harvard University.
Her research interests center on medicine and the biological sciences in the Greco-Roman world. Her book, Dissection in Classical Antiquity: A Social and Medical History (Cambridge, 2022), traces the practice of dissection from early Greece through Late Antiquity and offers a parallel study of anatomical literature across the same span. It received a C. J. Goodwin Award of Merit and a Young Historians Prize in 2023. She also co-edited, with Michael Peachin, the volume Medicine and the Law under the Roman Empire (Oxford, 2023), which argues for unique parallels between the two fields and juxtaposes them within their broader social contexts. In 2020/21, she co-curated ISAW’s first born-digital exhibition, The Empire’s Physician: Prosperity, Plague, and Healing in Ancient Rome, with Clare Fitzgerald and Alexander Jones. She has also published a set of dietetic translations (How to Eat: An Ancient Guide for Healthy Living (Princeton, 2025)), preliminary to her current book project focusing on the topics of diet and digestion in Greek and Roman medical and philosophical thought.
Other work includes studies of Aristotle’s biology, of material evidence for the cultural contexts of medical and biological knowledge, and of the spread and prevalence of medical and scientific knowledge. Broader interests range across the literature and society of the high Roman Empire, ancient education, animals, the reception of Greek medicine, and the social history of science.
Recent talks include 'Galen's Aesthetics of Health' (Princeton Classical Philosophy Colloquium, 2024 and Aesthetics of Illness in Antiquity, Patras, 2024), 'Approaching Medical and Philosophical Epitomes with Aristophanes of Byzantium, Anonymous London, and Qusta ibn Luqa' (Heteronomous Texts Workshop, Jena, 2024), 'The Monkey or the Slave?: Choosing the Subjects for Medical Teaching and Experimentation' (Celtic Classics Conference, Cardiff, 2024), ‘Galen and the Development of Digestion in the Roman Period’ (Prescription to Prediction: The Ancient Sciences in Cross-Cultural Perspective, Johns Hopkins, 2022), and ‘Fat Sheep and Tasty Fish: Diet and Nutrition in the Historia animalium’ (Philosophical Reflections on Aristotle’s Historia Animalium, Cambridge, 2022).
Recent teaching includes graduate seminars on the Galenic and Hippocratic corpora, on Aristotle’s zoological writings, on the social contexts of ancient science (with Alexander Jones), on Roman animals, on food and diet in Greco-Roman antiquity, and on textual and material approaches to the Roman body (with Sebastian Heath). She also teaches The Body in the Ancient Mediterranean in the NYU College Core Curriculum on a recurrent basis.
Publications
Books
- How to Eat: An Ancient Guide for Healthy Living. Princeton University Press, 2025.
- Medicine and the Law under the Roman Empire. Co-edited with M. Peachin. Oxford University Press, 2023.
- Dissection in Classical Antiquity: A Social and Medical History. Cambridge University Press, 2022.
Journal Articles
- ‘Aristotelian Zoology in the First and Second Centuries CE’, Classical Philology (forthcoming).
- ‘Ancient Conceptions of the Human Uterus: Italic Votives and Animal Wombs’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 79.2 (2024): 101-14.
- ‘A New Interpretation of the Medical Competitions at Ephesus (IEph IV 1161-69)’, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 221 (2022): 152-6.
- ‘Blood Flow in Aristotle’, Classical Quarterly 70.1 (2020): 137-53.
- ‘Hollows in the Heart: A Lexical Approach to Cardiac Structure in Aristotle’, Sudhoffs Archiv 103.2 (2019): 128-40.
- ‘The Physiology of Phantasmata in Aristotle: Between Sensation and Digestion’, Apeiron 52.3 (2019): 273-315.
Chapters in Edited Volumes
- ‘At the Borders of Horror and Science: The Social Contexts of Roman Dissection’, in Kazantzidis, G. and Thumiger, C., eds., Horror in Classical Antiquity and Beyond: Body, Affect, Concepts. Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2025.
- ‘Aristotle and the Medical Tradition on Sleep and Food’, in Bartoš, H. and Linka, V., eds., Aristotle Reads Hippocrates. Brill, 2024.
- ‘The Movement of Fluids in Hippocratic Places in Man and the Egyptian Vessel System’, in Schiødt, S., Jacob, A., and Ryholt, K., eds., Scientific Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East. ISAW Monographs, 2023: 183-202.
- ‘Medical Literature and Medicine: Going Beyond the Practical’, in Bubb, C. and Peachin, M., eds., Medicine and the Law in the Roman Empire. Oxford University Press, 2023: 196-215.
- ‘Setting Medicine and the Law Apart, Together’ (co-authored with M. Peachin), in Bubb, C. and Peachin, M., eds., Medicine and the Law in the Roman Empire. Oxford University Press, 2023: 3-42.
- ‘Introduction: The Ubiquity of Rhetoric’ (co-authored with U. Babusiaux), in Bubb, C. and Peachin, M., eds.,Medicine and the Law in the Roman Empire. Oxford University Press, 2023: 231-48.
- ‘Response: The Experts of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of Expertise’ (co-authored with J. Howley), in Bubb, C. and Peachin, M., eds., Medicine and the Law in the Roman Empire. Oxford University Press, 2023: 308-19.
Digital Exhibitions
- ‘Medieval Europe’, entry in Comparative Guts (digital exhibition curated by C. Thumiger).
- ‘The Empire’s Physician: Prosperity, Plague, and Healing in Ancient Rome’. Digital exhibition co-curated with C. Fitzgerald and A. Jones.