Rate My Professor Molly Pasco-Pranger

Molly Pasco-Pranger is Chair and Professor of Classics in the Department of Classics at the University of Mississippi, a position she has held since 2013 after joining the faculty in 2006. Prior to her arrival at Ole Miss, she taught Classics at the University of Puget Sound from 1998 to 2002 and at Wesleyan University from 2002 to 2006. She earned a B.A. in Latin from Oberlin College in 1992 and a Ph.D. in Classics from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in 1998, where her doctoral dissertation examined Ovid’s Fasti and its engagement with the Roman religious and political calendar. Dr. Pasco-Pranger is an affiliate of the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies and has been a member of the Women’s Classical Caucus since 1992.

Dr. Pasco-Pranger publishes and teaches on topics in ancient literature and Roman social history, with special interests in gender and religion. Her research on Ovid’s Fasti culminated in the monograph Founding the Year: Ovid’s Fasti and the Poetics of the Roman Calendar (Brill, 2006). Subsequent publications include articles on gender, writing, and desire in Roman amatory verse, as well as work on the literary and social persona of Cato the Elder, linked to her ongoing interest in masculinity and aging in ancient Rome. Key publications feature “With the Veil Removed: Women’s Public Nudity in the Early Roman Empire” (Classical Antiquity 38, 2019: 217-249), “Speaking Stone in Catullus 55” (Classical Philology 112, 2017: 89-97), “Finding Examples at Home: Cato, Curius Dentatus, and the Origins of Roman Literary Exemplarity” (Classical Antiquity 34, 2015: 296-321), “Naming Cato(s)” (Classical Journal 108, 2012: 1-35), “Duplicitous Simplicity in Ovid, Amores 1” (Classical Quarterly 62, 2012: 721-30), and “Sustaining Desire: Catullus 50, Gallus and Propertius 1.10” (Classical Quarterly 59, 2009: 142-46). Earlier works include contributions to edited volumes such as “Added Days: Calendrical Poetics and the Julio-Claudian Holidays” in Ovid’s Fasti: Historical Readings at its Bimillennium (Oxford, 2002). In recognition of her teaching excellence, she received the Cora Lee Graham Award for Outstanding Teaching of Freshmen in 2018. She is currently researching two damaged poems from a medieval manuscript potentially attributable to a female poet from the age of Domitian.