As Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Classics, Dr. Erin Lam teaches courses on love and desire in ancient Greco-Roman and contemporary American poetry, framed through queer and feminist studies.

They specialize in contemporary American queer of color poetry and art, Latin love elegy, and Greek tragedy. Their research engages in a creative practice of reimagining societal structures, relationality, temporality, and inheritance in dialogue with other queer of color artists and poets.

Their current book project, A Hermeneutics of Irreverence: Queer of Color Poets Playing with the “Classical Tradition,” theorizes irreverence as a methodology by which contemporary American queer of color artists and writers expand the creative possibilities of interacting with Greco-Roman literary tradition, which rejects them as Other while needing them to define itself as Not Other. Irreverence is an affective alchemization of the racial melancholia that is produced by this liminal position, a disidentification that levels assumed hierarchies of cultural value and transmission, making space for the messiness of queer of color life, death, transition, and everything in between. It manifests through mischievous wordplay, temporal scrambling, queer kinships, and the multiplication and explosion of binaries, all of which reconfigure what it means to “take” Western tradition “seriously.”

Before coming to UC Riverside, Professor Lam held the UC President’s and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at UCSB, the Consortium for Faculty Diversity Pre-/Post-doctoral Fellowship at Bryn Mawr College, and the Pearson Fellowship for study at Cambridge University.

They welcome students interested in intersectional queer and feminist theory, Classical reception studies, as well as those working across disciplines and/or with a creative practice.

Publications:

“Minoritizing Classics,” Res Difficiles 2.1 (2025): 72-76.

“Breaking Bodies: Materiality and Vulnerability in Heroides 12,” Ovidius 1 (2025): 71-105.

“Cruising Rome: Queer Orientations in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome (forthcoming 2025).

“Intimate Line(ages): Queer Reproductions and Gender Ambiguity in Girodet’s Anacréon,” co-authored with C.C. McKee, The Routledge Companion to Art History, edited by Jonathan D. Katz (forthcoming 2026).

“The Ephemerality of Textual Origin(al)s in Johanna Hedva’s ‘Motherload’,” Tragedy Queered, edited by Oliver Baldwin (forthcoming 2026).