Claire Bubb

Assistant Professor of Classical Literature and Science

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, with a particular focus on Galen and Aristotle. 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 C. J. Goodwin Award of Merit 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. Her current book project addresses the topic of digestion in Greek and Roman medical and philosophical thought. 

Her published work includes studies of Aristotle’s biology, especially in relation to his views on blood, digestion, and the vascular system, studies of material evidence for the cultural contexts of medical and biological knowledge, and studies 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 and the Development of Digestion in the Roman Period’ (Prescription to Prediction: The Ancient Sciences in Cross-Cultural Perspective, Johns Hopkins, 2022), ‘Fat Sheep and Tasty Fish: Diet and Nutrition in the Historia animalium’ (Philosophical Reflections on Aristotle’s Historia Animalium, Cambridge, 2022), ‘At the Borders of Horror and Science: The Social Contexts of Roman Dissection’ (Medical Knowledge and its ‘Sitz im Leben’: Body and Horror in Antiquity, Keil, 2021), ‘Aristotle and the Medical Tradition on Sleep and Food’ (Aristotle Reads Hippocrates, Charles University, Prague, 2021), and ‘Science and Spectacle in Galen’s Rome’ (ISAW Exhibition Lecture, 2021).

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 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                                                                                                     

Journal Articles

Chapters in Edited Volumes

Digital Exhibitions