Rate My Professor Brian Krostenko

Brian Alexander Krostenko is an Associate Professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Notre Dame, a position he has held since 2001. Prior to this, he served as Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley from 1993 to 1995, Assistant Professor at Notre Dame from 1995 to 1999, and Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago from 1999 to 2001. He has also held visiting positions, including Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago in 2020 and Profesor Afiliowany at the University of Warsaw in 2012–2013. Krostenko earned his Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Harvard University in 1993, an M.A. in Classical Philology from Harvard in 1989, and an A.B. summa cum laude in Classics from Princeton University in 1986, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

His research centers on the culture and law of the Late Roman Republic, Cicero, rhetoric, and Latin linguistics. Krostenko is the author of two monographs: Cicero, Catullus, and the Language of Social Performance (University of Chicago Press, 2001), which examines aestheticism in Roman culture through historical semantics, and The Voices of the Consul: The Rhetorics of Cicero’s de lege agraria I and II (Oxford University Press, 2023), the first book-length study employing discourse analysis to explore Cicero’s rhetorical strategies in these speeches. Notable articles include “PILA: A Historical-Linguistic Dataset of Proto-Italic and Latin” co-authored with S. Bothwell, B. DuSell, and D. Chiang (LREC-COLING 2024), “Pandering for the Greater Good? Senate, People, and Politics in Cicero’s de lege agraria I and II” (Polis 38.1, 2021), “Three Kinds of Ambiguity: Rhetoric and Christian Citizenship in the Martyr Act of Cyprian” (Wiener Studien 131, 2018), “The Poetics of Naevius’ ‘Epitaph’ and the History of Latin Poetry” (Journal of Roman Studies 104, 2013), and “Arbitria Elegantiae: Language, Style, and Characterization in Catullus cc. 39 and 37” (Classical Antiquity 20.2, 2001).

Krostenko has received several prestigious awards and fellowships, including a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the National Humanities Center (2001–2002), the Midili Humanities Fellowship from the Franco Family Institute (2025), and a fellowship at the National Humanities Center (2025). He currently serves as the Midili Humanities Fellow, working on Poetry and Social Class in 2nd c. Roman Italy: The Dedication of the Faliscan Cooks and Other Poems, which reconstructs the significance of a cooks' guild dedication using literary analysis, social anthropology, sociology, and sociolinguistics. He frequently teaches Latin Survey I, The History of Latin, Latin Prose Composition, and The Theory and Practice of Greco-Roman Rhetoric. Additionally, he has contributed as a referee for numerous journals and presses and coordinated the Polish-American Research Fellowship program from 2006–2007 and 2008–2015.