Luke Roman’s areas of research include Latin literature, Renaissance humanism, representations of the city of Rome, monuments and monumentality, ideas of place and space, the materiality of books and writing, the classical tradition, and the global discipline of Classics. His monograph Poetic Autonomy in Ancient Rome (OUP, 2014), examines the rhetoric of autonomy in Roman first-person poetry from the late republic to the early empire. Another major focus of his research is Renaissance Latin literature. In 2011-2012, he was a year-long, residential fellow at the Villa I Tatti in Florence (The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies). He has produced two volumes, with introduction, translations, and notes, of the Neapolitan humanist Giovanni Pontano’s poetic works for the I Tatti Renaissance Library Series (Harvard University Press, 2014, 2023). He is also part of a team preparing a three-volume edition of George Herbert's complete works (OUP, under contract).

Currently, he is collaborating with classicists in Nigeria and Ghana, exploring the discipline of Classics from a global perspective. In May 2019, he organized an international conference on Classical Antiquity and Local Identities: from Newfoundland to Nigeria and Ghana at Memorial University (supported by a SSHRC Connection Grant, PI). He is co-director, along with Olakunbi Olasope (U. Ibadan) and Hasskei Majeed (U. Ghana), of a collaborative project focused on building global networks in Classics, supported by a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant, Classics at the Crossroads: Partnership, Mobility, and Exchange Between Ghana, Nigeria, and Canada (2024-2027, PI).