Scott McGill’s work focuses on Latin poetry, Roman history and culture, and on the reception of classical antiquity. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Humanities Center, and he is a faculty fellow at Rice’s Center for Teaching Excellence. His course on Roman civilization often draws more than 100 students and is consistently one of the largest courses in the humanities at Rice, highlighting the continued importance of classical studies in today's world.

A renowned expert on Virgil and on the Latin poetry of late antiquity, McGill is the author of four books and he also edited four critical volumes. He is on the editorial board of Studies in Late Antiquity and he is the editor-in-chief of Brill’s Research Perspectives on Classical Poetry.

Together with Susannah Wright, he is currently working on a verse translation of Virgil's Aeneid, which is under contract with W. W. Norton, and with John Hopkins he has just finished work on an edited volume, Beyond Deceit: Valuing Forgery in Ancient Rome, which is based on the 2013 Rice Seminar entitled “Forgery and the Ancient: Art, Agency, Authorship.” Among his other projects is a commentary on the Virgilian Centos in the Anthologia Latina.

Selected Publications

1. Books and Edited Volumes

• Virgil, Aeneid 11: A Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
• Ed. with Edward J. Watts, A Companion to Late Antique Literature (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2018).
• Juvencus’ Four Books of the Gospels (New York: Routledge, 2016). Paperback edition 2017.
• Ed. with Joseph Pucci, Classics Renewed: Reception and Innovation in the Latin Poetry of Late Antiquity (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 2016).
• Plagiarism in Latin Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Paperback edition 2020.
• Ed. with Cristiana Sogno and Edward Watts, From the Tetrarchs to the Theodosians: Later Roman History and Culture, 284-450 CE (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
• Virgil Recomposed: The Mythological and Secular Virgilian Centos in Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

2. Journal Articles and Book Chapters

• “The Appendix Vergiliana,” in Charles Martindale and Fiachra Mac Góráin (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 63-76.
• “Minor opus moveo: Verse Summaries of Virgil in the Anthologia Latina,” in Marco Formisano and Christina Shuttleworth Kraus (eds.), Canonicity and Marginality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 263-86.
• “Rewriting Ausonius,” in Jaś Elsner and ‎Jesús Hernández Lobato (eds.), The Poetics of Late Latin Literature(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 252-77.
• “Ausonius at Night,” American Journal of Philology 135 (2014), 123-48.
• “The Plagiarized Virgil in Donatus, Servius, and the Anthologia Latina,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology107 (2013), 365-83.
• “Latin Poetry,” in Scott Fitzgerald Johnson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 335-60.
• “Tragic Virgil: Rewriting Virgil as a Tragedy in the Cento Medea,” Classical World 95/2 (2002), 143-61. 

Recent Courses

• CLAS 225 Augustus and the “Golden Age” of Rome
• CLAS 208 The Fall of Rome
• CLAS 108 Roman Civilization and Its Legacy
• LATI 301 Cicero and Sallust