Biography
I am currently an Associate Lecturer in Latin here at the School of Classics. At the moment, I teach on many of our Latin modules, from World of Latin to Latin Letters and Latin Literary Culture. I will also teach a number of lectures on the late Roman Republic, and in Candlemas term I will teach an honours module on Displacement in Latin Literature.
Prior to my time here in St Andrews, I worked as a Teaching Fellow in Classics at Durham University (UK), where I also completed my dissertation. My AHRC-funded PhD thesis (‘All Roads Lead to Home: Navigating Self and Empire in Early Imperial Latin Poetry’, 2021) examined how generic heterogeneity in the works of early imperial Latin poets functioned as a way of contemplating and constructing imperial power and expressing increasingly complex conceptualisations of Romanness.
Additionally, I hold an MA (research in Classics and Ancient Civilizations from VU University Amsterdam and UVA University Amsterdam, and a BA in Classics from VU University Amsterdam.
Research areas
My research focuses on Neronian and Flavian poetry, concentrating on the rhetoric and epistemologies of Roman imperialism in poetry. To this end, I work with intertextuality - between prose and poetry, and across Greek and Latin - in Flavian literature, to examine how these texts (re)construct Roman imperialist narratives. I ground this thinking in methodologies developed by theorists working at the intersections of social geography, postcolonialism, and queer studies, such as bell hooks, Sara Ahmed, and Doreen Massey.
Firstly, I am interested in the uses of genre and intertextuality in writers' explorations of and reflections on imperial conquest, and the ways in which they express complex conceptualisations of Romanness. I have, for example, published on Lucan's Civil War, examining the embedding of Caesar's Rubicon crossing in Roman formalised practices of departure and return, and, more specifically, in Roman (fetial) rituals of war. I am also working on articles - and have given papers - about (1) literary 'strange encounters' between Rome and Egypt in Lucan, drawing on Theocritus, Theophrastus, and Virgil's Georgics, and about (2) the Sicilian bull of Phalaris myth and its imperial limitless hunger in Flavian literature as contemplating the consequences of Rome's incorporative epistemology of imperialism.
Relatedly, I work on philosophical aspects of Neronian and Flavian poetry, In particular, I have been working on Senecan drama, examining the notion of agency and its functions in the interpretation of intertextuality and Stoic cognition theory. I have also written about Stoic and Epicurean aspects of Flavian poetry more widely, especially in Statius' Silvae.
Selected publications
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Open access
Flavian responses to Nero's Rome
Heerink, M. (ed.) & Meijer, E. (ed.), 29 Sept 2022, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 358 p.Research output: Book/Report › Book
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Open access
Introduction
Meijer, E., 29 Sept 2022, Flavian responses to Nero's Rome. Heerink, M. & Meijer, E. (eds.). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, p. 11-30 20 p.Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter
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Open access
Justifying civil war: interactions between Caesar and the Italian landscape in Lucan’s Rubicon Passage (BC 1.183–235)
Meijer, E., 25 Feb 2021, Landscapes of war in Greek and Roman literature. Reitz-Joosse, B., Makins, M. W. & Mackie, C. J. (eds.). London: Bloomsbury Academic, p. 175-176 20 p. (Bloomsbury classical studies monographs).Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter