Research Areas:
Greek and Roman literature and cultural history; ancient books and readers; ancient music; literary papyri.

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, Herodotus, Propertius, Pliny (both Elder and Younger), 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); and his book on the book, Bookrolls and Scribes  in Oxyrhynchus, a close study of the artefactual remains of over 400 ancient papyrus bookrolls (University of Toronto Press, 2004). Other recent work has focused on ancient music; he produced the editio princeps for two of the very rare papyrus documents containing ancient Greek music (details and sound at his web site, http://classics.uc.edu/music/). He teaches a wide range of Greek and Latin topics to undergraduate and graduate audiences; graduate seminars have included studies of literary papyri, Pliny the Younger (see http://classics.uc.edu/~johnson/pliny/), Herodotus (http://classics.uc.edu/~johnson/herodotus/), and Ancient Libraries (http://classics.uc.edu/~johnson/libraries/).