Participant Info

First Name
Elena
Last Name
Giusti
Country
United Kingdom
State
Affiliation
University of Warwick
Website URL
https://warwick.academia.edu/ElenaGiustiro
Keywords
Latin Literature and Thought, Roman History, Classical Reception, Premodern Conceptions of Race, Intersections of Classics and European Colonialism
Availability
Media Contact
Additional Contact Information
PhD
PhD

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

I am currently an Associate Professor in Latin Literature and Language at the University of Warwick. I was previously Research Fellow in Classics at St John’s College Cambridge (2015-2017) and University Teacher in Classics at the University of Glasgow (2014-2015). I studied at the University of Rome La Sapienza (BA and MA) and at King’s College Cambridge (PhD).

I am broadly interested in Roman literature and thought, with a specialism in Augustan literature and Virgil in particular. I have published articles and book chapters at the junctures between traditional philology, cultural and intellectual history, and literary theory, with special interests in ideology critique, postcolonial studies and feminist theories.

I have worked extensively on representations of Africa and African people in Greco-Roman literature. Many of my publications, and especially my first monograph (Carthage in Virgil’s Aeneid: Staging the Enemy under Augustus, Cambridge 2018), map the oft-neglected influence of Carthage in Roman literature and thought, arguing for its significance in wider debates about the role of Greek literature and culture in the formation of Roman identity.

I am currently working on a book, entitled Rome’s Imagined Africa and generously supported by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship (2022-2023), on representations of Africa and Africans in Latin literature of the early imperial period. One of my aims is to show that a significant shift in the conceptualisation of Africa and of the whole oikoumene took place in this specific timeframe, especially in the ages of Augustus and Nero, and that the texts produced in this period bear commonalities with later European proto-colonialist and colonialist literature that allow us to bridge the gap between antiquity and modernity on the history of Western constructions of subaltern identities in the African continent.

Together with Rosa Andújar and Jackie Murray, I am currently co-editing the new Cambridge Companion to Classics and Race; with Samuel Agbamu, I am both co-writing a book on Dido and her reception (Dido of Carthage: the Making and Unmaking of a Classical Tradition, Bloomsbury) and a collection of essays on Classics and Italian Colonialism (De Gruyter).

You can download some of my publications here

Recent Publications

Monographs

Commentaries

  • (in preparation, under contract) Virgilio: Eneide Libro V, Milano: Fondazione Lorenzo Valla.

Edited Volumes

  • (forthcoming) ed. with S. Agbamu. Classics and Italian Colonialism, De Gruyter.
  • (forthcoming, 2025) ed. with R. Andújar and J. Murray. The Cambridge Companion to Classics and Race, Cambridge University Press.
  • (forthcoming, 2024) ed. with M. Hanses and G. Laterza. Homo bene figuratus inter disciplinas: Methodological Variations on a Single Passage (Vitruvius De Architectura III.1), special issue of Ramus.
  • (2021) ed. with V. Rimell. Vergil and the Feminine, special issue of Vergilius 67.
  • (2021) ed. with T. Geue. Unspoken Rome: Absence in Latin Literature and its Reception, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Articles and Book Chapters

Media Coverage
Country Focus
Expertise by Geography
Africa, Mediterranean
Expertise by Chronology
Ancient
Expertise by Topic
Colonialism, Gender, Literary History, Race