Kirk Freudenburg Wins 2024 McKay Prize from Vergilian Society
Freudenburg was honored for his 2022 book, Virgil's Cinematic Art: Vision as Narrative in the Aeneid.
Kirk Freudenburg, Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Classics, has been awarded the 2024 Alexander G. McKay Prize by the Vergilian Society for his book Virgil's Cinematic Art: Vision as Narrative in the Aeneid (Oxford University Press, 2022).
The Vergilian Society awards the Alexander G. McKay Book Prize every other year to the writer of a book that “makes the greatest contribution toward our understanding and appreciation of Vergil or topics related to Vergil.”
The prize committee called Virgil’s Cinematic Art is “a major contribution by a leading scholar of Latin literature,” and wrote that Freudenburg’s book “falls into the domain of classical reception at its most effective in showing how a later interpretation of an ancient text can help us unlock a productive new reading of that text.”
The committee concluded: “Virgil’s Cinematic Art is both a tour-de-force and a model for interdisciplinary studies, and its author, Kirk Freudenburg, is eminently deserving to be recognized as a recipient of the McKay Prize.”
Freudenburg was recognized at the Vergilian Society session at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Classical Studies.