Christopher Londa is a scholar of the literature, culture, and history of the Roman world, with an emphasis on the late Republican and early Imperial periods. His research asks how literary texts and practices relate to the labor conditions that enable them, including slavery, precarity, displacement, patronage, and property.

His current book project, Hidden Labor in Roman Authorship and Literature, grapples with the centrality of a marginalized workforce to the production, circulation, and performance of literary texts in Roman Italy during the first centuries BCE and CE. The book describes the ecosystem of secretaries, copyists, lectors, teachers, and scholars who catalyzed the literary activity of elite Roman authors and readers. The book asks how the hidden presence of these workers “in the room” shapes the texts and ideas that come out of it.

Dr. Londa joined the Department of Classics at the Johns Hopkins University in 2023 as a Loeb Classical Library Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow. He completed his PhD in Classics from Yale University (2023) and was in residence at the University of Graz as a Fulbright Award winner (2022–23). He earned his MA from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin with the support of a DAAD Award and his BA from Harvard University.

During the Fall 2024 semester, Dr. Londa is teaching a graduate seminar at Johns Hopkins on “Slavery and Literature in the Ancient Roman World.”