Lowell Bowditch received her B.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley in 1984 and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Brown University in 1992. She has been at the University of Oregon since 1993 and has taught a wide range of language and literature courses on epic, tragedy, gender and sexuality in antiquity, postcolonialism and the Classics, and the Augustan era.

Professor Bowditch’s research explores the interface between the literature and socio-political relations of Augustan Rome. Her current work focuses on love elegy and Roman imperialism from postcolonial perspectives. She is the author of Roman Love Elegy and the Eros of Empire (London and New York 2023), Horace and the Gift Economy of Patronage (Los Angeles and Berkeley 2001), A Propertius Reader. Eleven Selected Elegies (Bolchazy-Carducci 2014), and of articles on Tibullus, Propertius, Horace, Ovid, and issues of translation. Publications include: "Roman Love Elegy and the Eros of Empire," in ed. Barbara Gold, A Companion to Roman Love Elegy. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. (2012) 119-133; “Horace and the Pyrrhatechnics of Translation,” Classical World,104.3 (2011) 355-62; “Tibullus and Egypt: A Postcolonial Reading of Elegy 1.7,” Arethusa, 44.1 (2011) 88-121; “Horace and Imperial Patronage,” in ed. Gregson Davis, Companion to Horace. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. (2010) 53-74; “Palatine Apollo and the Imperial Gaze: Propertius 2.31 and 2.32,” American Journal of Philology 130.3. (2009) 401-438; "Propertius and the Gendered Rhetoric of Luxury and Empire; A Reading of 2.16," Comparative Literature Studies, 43.3 (2006) 306-325; "Hermeneutic Uncertainty and the Female Subject in Ovid's Art of Love," in eds. Ronnie Ancona and Ellen Greene, The Gendered Dynamics of Latin Love Poetry. Baltimore 2005. 271-295.