Niall Rudd

William James Niall Rudd (23 June 1927 – 5 October 2015) was an Irish-born British classical scholar.

Life and work

Rudd was born in Dublin and studied Classics at Trinity College, Dublin. He then taught Latin at the Universities of Hull and Manchester. From 1958 to 1968 he was Associate Professor of Latin at University College, Toronto. In 1968 he returned to England and taught for five years as a professor of Latin at the University of Liverpool. In 1973 he moved to the University of Bristol to the chair of Latin, where he remained until his retirement in 1989. From 1976 to 1979 he was Director (Head of Department) of the Department of Classics and Archaeology.

After retirement Rudd returned to Liverpool and was appointed an Honorary Research Fellow there. Trinity College Dublin awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1998 (DLitt). Rudd died of Melanoma after a long illness (Alzheimer's) on 5 October 2015 at St. John's Hospice on the Wirral.

Rudd worked intensively with Latin literature, especially Roman poetry, and its reception in English literature of the modern age. He wrote books, monographs and articles about works of Cicero, and on the satires of Horace and Juvenal whose work he presented in English translation. This work has been published in two collections (1994, 2005). In addition, he published, in 1994, an autobiographical record of his childhood and youth in Ireland.