Special Feature: Stephanie McCarter
Stephanie McCarter (’00) graduated summa cum laude with undergraduate degrees in classics and English before going on to earn her PhD in classics from the University of Virginia in 2007. She was a first-generation college student and member of Phi Beta Kappa. She started a successful career at the University of the South (Sewanee), where she was promoted to associate professor in 2014 and professor in 2021.
She received a Professional Achievement Award from the UT College of Arts and Sciences, which recognizes alumni who have achieved a high degree of success in their chosen field, a record of notable accomplishments, and a history of outstanding contributions to their discipline and/or creative pursuits.
McCarter’s greatest professional achievement is as a masterful translator of Latin poetry, for which she has gained world renown. She has produced two hefty volumes of translations, with introductions and notes, of Horace’s Epodes, Odes, and Carmen Saeculare (published by the U. of Oklahoma Press in 2020) and of Ovid’s epic poem the Metamorphoses (published by Penguin Classics in 2022). Another book titled Women in Power: Classical Myths and Stories from the Amazons to Cleopatra is in press, and McCarter is now preparing a translation of the poems of Catullus.
McCarter is the first female classicist to have translated all of Horace’s poems and the first woman in 60 years to have translated Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Importantly, McCarter is sensitive to the female perspective in Horace’s love poems and Ovid’s stories of divine rapes of female characters. Whereas previous male translators often “romanticized” sexual assault or made light of it, even suggesting female consent, McCarter’s choice of words makes the violence explicit and invites discussion of power and gender relations in Roman times as well as in the present. Thus her unflinching translations demonstrate the continuing relevance of the classics to today’s world.
McCarter’s work has received rave reviews in international journals such as Cambridge’s Classical Review, Spain’s Exemplaria Classica, and Bryn Mawr Classical Reviews. Her translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, one of The New Yorker’s best books of 2022, this year received the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. In one glowing review of that work, Richard Tarrant, Pope Professor of Latin at Harvard, notes that “As a vehicle for serious engagement with Ovid’s poem in English, McCarter has no rival.”
Her works have also received major media coverage and she has presented invited seminars around the world. It is no exaggeration to state that Stephanie McCarter has become one of the world’s leading translators of Latin poetry.
“Classics professors nurtured my intellectual development, while also helping build my confidence in ways both big and small,” McCarter said. “My classics professors continue to be a guiding beacon as demonstrated by my presence here tonight made possible because they thought me deserving of this award. I am deeply touched once again by their kindness and readily give them every bit of the credit. I really do owe them and this university everything I have achieved in my career.”