ANCIENT MUSIC           ASP            BIBLIOGRAPHICA                

Curriculum Vitae

Occasional Remarks

Courses Past and Present

Ancient Music Web Site

American Society of Papyrologists

Bibliographical Resources

William A. Johnson works broadly in the cultural history of Greece and Rome, with particular interest in ancient books, readers, and reading, and with a general interest in how literary pursuits intersect with cultural context in antiquity. He has lectured and published on Plato, Hesiod, Herodotus, Pliny (both Elder and Younger), Gellius, Lucian and on a variety of topics relating to books and readers, both ancient and modern. Some prominent and illustrative examples: "Towards a Sociology of Reading" (American Journal of Philology, 2000), winner of the Gildersleeve Prize; "Reading cultures, Technology, and Education" (in Reading between the Lines, Yale University Press, 2003); his book on the book, Bookrolls and Scribes in Oxyrhynchus, a close study of the artefactual remains of over 400 papyrus bookrolls (University of Toronto Press, 2004, paperback 2013); Ancient Literacies, an edited volume exploring new approaches to the topic (Oxford University Press, 2009, paperback 2011); and his Readers and Reading Culture in the High Empire, a study of elite reading communities under Trajan and the Antonines (Oxford University Press, 2010, paperback 2012). Other work has focused on ancient music; he produced the editio princeps for two of the very rare papyrus documents containing ancient Greek music (see Ancient Music Web Site). He teaches a wide range of Greek and Latin topics to undergraduate and graduate audiences; recent graduate seminars have included studies of literary papyri, Hesiod, Herodotus, Plato, Lucian, Pliny the Younger, Ancient Libraries, and Roman Villa Culture.