In this episode, I speak with the classicist Julia Hejduk on Ovid’s The Art of Love. I hope you enjoy our conversation!

Dr. Julia D. Hejduk holds a B.A. in Classics from Princeton University (1988) and a Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Harvard University (1993).  Inspired by the opportunity to work for a truly Christian research university, she began teaching at Baylor University in 2003, after 10 years on the faculty at the University of Texas at Arlington. She has published numerous articles, four books, and an edited collection on ancient Latin poetry, most recently The God of Rome: Jupiter in Augustan Poetry (Oxford 2020). She is particularly fascinated by Roman religion, women in antiquity, intertextuality, acrostics, and the classical tradition—interests that have led her to scholarly inquiry on such diverse artists as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, and Christopher Nolan.

Dr. Hejduk is married to Dr. Matthew Hejduk, an astrodynamicist for NASA, who is also a member of Baylor’s graduate faculty. She has three adult children, Natalie, Anthony, and Nathaniel.  She is actively involved with the St. Peter Catholic Student Center, with the faculty singing group Amici Musici, and with modeling charitable conversations on controversial issues.

Jennifer A. Frey is the inaugural dean of the Honors College at the University of Tulsa, with a secondary appointment as professor of philosophy in the department of philosophy and religion. Previously, she was an Associate Professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina, where she was also a Peter and Bonnie McCausland faculty fellow in the College of Arts and Sciences. Prior to her tenure at Carolina, she was a Collegiate Assistant Professor the Humanities at the University of Chicago, and a junior fellow of the Society for the Liberal Arts.

She earned her Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh and her B.A. in philosophy and Medieval Studies (with a Classics minor) at Indiana University-Bloomington. In 2015, she was awarded a multi-million dollar grant from the John Templeton Foundation, titled “Virtue, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life,” She has published widely on virtue and moral psychology, and she has edited three academic volumes on virtue and human action. Her writing has been featured in First Things, Image, Law and Liberty, The Point, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal.  She lives with her husband and six children in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She is on X @jennfrey.