Paul Roche

Professor Paul Roche is a leading scholar in Latin literature at The University of Sydney, specializing in late Republican and Imperial Roman works (1st century BCE to 1st century CE), with extensions into post-Roman reception. His scholarship focuses on Lucan's Civil War through detailed commentaries (Books I, VII, X), analyzing formal elements alongside socio-political contexts. He explores Lucan's influence across Flavian epics, Claudian poetry, and late antique epistolography, while investigating Roman doctrina through Greek-Latin bilingual references in Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. His work on Pliny's Panegyricus connects Trajanic rhetoric with material culture.

Roche's scientific awards include Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (FAHA). Current projects involve completing Lucan, De Bello Civili Book 10 (OUP) and directing the ARC Discovery Project DP220100395: The Vandal Renaissance, studying North African Latin poetry (453-534 CE). He supervises research students in topics like decapitation metaphors and monstrosity in antiquity.

His research output includes Dracontius: Orestes (Routledge 2022), Reading Lucan's Civil War (Oklahoma 2021), and foundational commentaries on Lucan. Teaching spans Greek and Roman Myth, Imperial Poetry, and Roman Topography. Roche contributes to classical reception studies and is affiliated with The Vere Gordon Childe Centre.