Hunter Gardner joined the Classics Program of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures in 2007, and has since 2008 been an affiliate of Women’s and Gender Studies; in 2014 she joined the core faculty the Comparative Literature Program.  In 2013 she was named an inaugural McCausland Fellow by the College of Arts and Sciences, as recognition of her outstanding teaching and scholarship.  Dr. Gardner’s initial research efforts at USC were devoted to exploring the relationship between the genre of Latin love elegy and the Augustan historical context from which it emerged. Her monograph, Gendering Time in Augustan Love Elegy, was published by Oxford University Press in 2013. Dr. Gardner’s second book, Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature (Oxford 2019), explores the development of plague narratives in the western tradition and, in particular, looks to Roman epic poets writing in the late Republic and early Principate as significant contributors to depictions of contagion.  Her most recent monograph, The Latin Love Elegists, offers an overview of the genre and current scholarship as well as directions for further research (Brill 2024).

In addition to teaching and publishing in the field of Latin literature, Dr. Gardner regularly works in the area of reception studies.  She has co-edited a collection of essays on adaptations of the Odysseus myth in various media (novels, visual arts, television), Odyssean Identities in Modern Cultures: The Journey Home (2014; paperback, 2016).  She also teaches a course on the reception of Greco-Roman antiquity in cinema and popular culture.  She has published numerous articles on the topic, including one on Pygmalion figures in twentieth-century horror films, and co-edited a volume on the persistence of epic tropes in contemporary media, Ancient Epic in Film and Television (Edinburgh University Press 2021).