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 a 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
- 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
- ‘Ancient Conceptions of the Human Uterus: Italic Votives and Animal Wombs’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (published online 2023).
- ‘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
- ‘Aristotle and the Medical Tradition on Sleep and Food’, in Bartoš, H. and Linka, V., eds., Aristotle Reads Hippocrates. Brill, forthcoming.
- ‘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.