Tom Zanker received his doctorate from Princeton in 2010, and greatly looks forward to his third year of teaching at Harvard, now as a lecturer. His dissertation (and current book project) focuses on descriptions of decline and related phenomena in Horace’s Odes and Epodes. It considers how Horace makes use of apparently pessimistic refrains within his verse, how these rely on different structures, and how they evolve in the course of his poetry. He has published on a range of topics, such as the concept of the golden age, the history of Vergilian scholarship, Hesiod's Works and Days, and the field of reception studies. He is also interested in the contemporary philosophy of language, and particularly in how expressions of meaning were employed in Greek and Latin. This year, Tom will be offering undergraduate courses on Homer, Seneca and Lucan, leading a graduate seminar on Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, and launching himself once more into the brilliant world of Classical Mythology.