Dr Elena Giusti

Biography

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

Research

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.

My first monograph (Carthage in Virgil's Aeneid: Staging the Enemy under Augustus, Cambridge 2018) maps 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. It explores how Virgil’s Aeneid constructs, exploits, and subverts notions of Romans and Barbarians, and hides memories of both Punic and Civil Wars behind a mythical but cautionary tale. Among my current Virgilian projects, I am writing a commentary on Aeneid 5 for a new Lorenzo Valla commented edition of the Aeneid and co-writing a book on Dido of Carthage (with Samuel Agbamu) for Bloomsbury Academics.

I am currently writing a second monograph (Rome’s Imagined Africa, supported by a British Academy mid-career fellowship), which examines Roman literary representations of Africa (both Africa in the Latin sense of the term, and Aethiopia) and autochthonous African people at the turn between the Republic and 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. Africa emerges as a unique case study for understanding how histories of race, xenophobia, formation of the ‘Other’ work in (dis-)continuity between pre- and early modernity.

Another major strand of my research deals with strategies of textual absence and self-censorship under authoritarian regimes. In the pipeline, I am planning a monograph (Augustan Poetry and its Conspiracies) that will reflect upon ‘conspiracy’ as a simultaneously historical and literary practice, theorising a novel approach to reading poetic ambiguity and faltering political allegiance in Augustan poetry. The project employs the lens of ‘conspiracy’ both as a fundamental historical reality of the late Republic and early Augustan period that imbued these texts with a sense of political instability, and as a poetic strategy by which Augustan authors engage their readers, anticipating our own hermeneutic suspicions.

I have been involved in many collaborative projects. Together with Rosa Andújar and Jackie Murray, I am co-editing the new Cambridge Companion to Classics and Race; with Samuel Agbamu, I am editing a collection of essays on Classics and Italian Colonialism (De Gruyter). With Tom Geue, I co-edited a volume (Unspoken Rome: Absence in Latin Literature and its Reception, Cambridge 2021) that treats textual absence as a fundamental generative force both for the hermeneutics and the ongoing literary aftermath of Latin literary texts. With Victoria Rimell, I have co-edited a collection of essays on feminist theory and Virgilian scholarship (Vergil and the Feminine, special issue of Vergilius 2021); with Mathias Hanses and Giovanna Laterza, a special journal issue of Ramus on different interpretative readings of the Vitruvian man (2024).

Publications

Key publications:

Monographs

(in preparation) Rome’s Imagined Africa.
(in preparation, under contract) with Samuel Agbamu. Dido of Carthage, London: Bloomsbury.
(2018) Carthage in Virgil's Aeneid : Staging the Enemy under Augustus, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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) ed. with R. Andújar and J. Murray. The Cambridge Companion to Classics and Race, Cambridge University Press.
(2023) 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 52.2.
(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

with Andújar, R. and Murray, J. (forthcoming) ‘Introduction’, in R. Andújar, E. Giusti and J. Murray (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Classics and Race, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
(forthcoming) ‘Ethnographic Discourses: Rome’s Racialised Africa?’, in R. Andújar, E. Giusti and J. Murray (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Classics and Race, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
(forthcoming) ‘(The Problem with) Decoding Dido’, in S. P. Oakley and A. Schiesaro (eds.) Festschrift in honour of Philip Hardie, Supplementary volume of Trends in Classics, Berlin: De Gruyter.
(forthcoming, 2025) ‘Lucan’s Magico-Medical Psylli’, in C. Blanco, A. Hahn and S. Martorana (eds.) Body and Medicine in Latin Poetry, Supplementary volume of Trends in Classics, Berlin: De Gruyter, 179-95.
(2025) ‘Haec de Africa: Rome’s Imagined Africa and the Limits of Fiction’, in Blouin, K. and Akrigg, B. Handbook of Classics and Postcolonial Theory, London: Routledge, 301-15.
(2024) ‘La Didone virgiliana e la poetica dell’errare’, in Migliore, E., Oliva, M. and Vergara, C. (eds.) Noster delectat error: l’errore tra filologia e letteratura, Firenze: Società Editrice Fiorentina, 85-107.
(2023) with G. Laterza. ‘Vitruvius’ Homo bene figuratus: Preliminary Remarks’ in E. Giusti, M. Hanses and G. Laterza (eds.) Vitruvius’ Homo bene figuratus: Methodological Variations on a Single Passage (De architectura 3.1), Ramus 52.2, 108-20.
(2023) ‘Rac(ializ)ing Dido’, Proceedings of the Virgil Society 31, 53-85.
(2023) ‘The Techne that Races: Phoenician-Punic Technosômata in Homer and Plautus’, in G. M. Chesi and M. Gerolemou (eds.) Body Technologies in the Greco-Roman World: Technosoma, Gender, and Sex, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 197-215.
(2023) ‘Virgilian Criticism and the Intertextual Aeneid: Review Article of Joseph Farrell (2021) Juno's Aeneid: A Battle for Heroic Identity, Princeton’, Mnemosyne.
(2023) ‘Africa and the Making of Classical Literature: On Decolonizing Greco-Roman Literature Syllabi’, in M. K. Okyere Asante, D. van Schoor and K. Ackah (eds.) Decolonizing Classics in Africa: History, Strategies, Challenges, and Prospects, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 65.1, 67-78.
(2022) ‘Horace's Ode 1.12: Subterranean Lyrics’, The American Journal of Philology 143.1, 75-107.
(2021, with V. Rimell) ‘Vergil and the Feminine: Introduction’, in E. Giusti and V. Rimell (eds.) Vergil and the Feminine, Vergilius 67, 3-23.
(2021, with T. Geue) 'Unspoken Rome: Introduction', in Geue, T. and Giusti, E. (eds.) Unspoken Rome: Absence in Latin Literature and its Reception, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1-16.
(2021) ‘Caesarism as Stasis from Gramsci to Lucan: an “Equilibrium with Catastrophic Prospects”', in A. M. Cimino and E. Zucchetti (eds.) Antonio Gramsci and the Ancient World, London: Routledge, 239-54.
(2021) ‘The End is the Beginning is the End: Apocalyptic Beginnings in Augustan Poetry,’ in H. Marlow, K. Pollmann and H. Van Noorden (eds.) Eschatology in Antiquity, London: Routledge, 307-19.
(2020) 'Casta Diva: Juno's "Unexpected Pain" in Statius' Thebaid', EuGeStA 10, 163-206.
(2019) ‘Aeneid 12: A Cyborg Border War’ in G. M. Chesi and F. Spiegel (eds.) Classical Literature and Posthumanism, London: Bloomsbury, 275-83.
(2019) ‘Ovid’s Ars Poetica: Metapoetic Didactic in the Ars Amatoria,’ in L.G. Canevaro and D. O’Rourke (eds.) Didactic Poetry from Homer and Hesiod Onwards: Knowledge, Power, Tradition, Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 151-77.
(2019) ‘Bunte Barbaren Setting Up the Stage: Re-inventing the Barbarian on the Georgics’ Theatre-Temple,’ in B. Xinyue and N. Freer (eds.) (2019), Virgil's Georgics: Reflections and New Perspectives, London: Bloomsbury, 105-14.
(2018) ‘Tiresias, Ovid, Gender and Trouble: Generic Conversions from Ars into Tristia,’ in Ramus 47.1, 1-31.
(2017) ‘The Metapoetics of Liber-ty. Horace’s Bacchic Ship in Seneca’s De Tranquillitate Animi,’ in M. Stöckinger, K. Winter and T. Zanker (eds.) Horace and Seneca: Interactions, Intertexts, Interpretations, Berlin: De Gruyter, 239-63.
(2017) ‘Virgil’s Carthage: a Heterotopic Space of Empire,’ in M. Asper and V. Rimell (eds.)Imagining Empire: Political Space in Hellenistic and Roman Literature, Heidelberg, 133-50.
(2016) ‘Did Somebody Say Augustan Totalitarianism? Duncan Kennedy's Reflections, Hannah Arendt's Origins, and the Continental Divide over Virgil's Aeneid,’ in Dictynna 13.
(2016) ‘My Enemy’s Enemy is My Enemy: Virgil’s Illogical Use of Metus Hostilis,’ in P. Hardie (ed.) Augustan Poetry and the Irrational, Oxford, 37-55.
(2016) ‘Dithyrambic Iambics: Epode 9 and its General(s’) Confusion,’ in P. Bather and C. Stocks (eds.) Horace's Epodes: Contexts, Intertexts, and Reception, Oxford, 131-51.
(2015) ‘Caesar Criss-Crossing the Rubicon: a Palindromic Acrostic in Lucan (BC 1.218-22),’ in The Classical Quarterly n.s. 65, 892-4.
(2014) ‘Once More Unto the Breach: Virgil’s Arae and the Treaty of Philinus,’ in Studi Italiani di Filologia Classica 107.1, 61-79.
(2014) ‘Virgil's Carthaginians at Aen.1.430-6: Cyclopes in Bees' Clothing,’ in The Cambridge Classical Journal 60, 37-58.

Reviews

(2024) Review of S. Casali, Virgilio: guida all’Eneide (Rome: Carocci 2023), Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2024.04.10
(2023) Dyson Hejduk, The God of Rome. Jupiter in Augustan Poetry (New York: Oxford UP 2020), Gnomon 95.7, 605-8.
(2022) Review of I. Hesekamp Das Bild von Africa in der augusteischen Dichtung: poetische Konstruktionen eines geographischen Raumes (Vergil, Aeneid – Horaz – Properz) (Berlin and Boston 2021), in Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2022.07.10.
(2020) Review of Lee M. Fratantuono and R. Alden Smith, Aeneid 8: Text, Translation, and Commentary, Mnemosyne Supplementum 416 (Leiden; Boston 2018), in The Journal of Roman Studies.
(2018) Review of L. Bocciolini Palagi, La musa e la furia. Interpretazione del secondo proemio dell’Eneide (Testi e Manuali per l’insegnamento universitario del latino 135) (Bologna 2016), in Classical Review 68.2.
(2018) Review of S. J. Heyworth and J. H. W. Morwood, A Commentary on Vergil, Aeneid 3 (Oxford 2017), in Classical Review 68.2.
(2018) Review of H.-P. Stahl, Poetry Underpinning Power. Vergil’s Aeneid: the Epic for Emperor Augustus. A Recovery Study (Swansea 2016), in Classical Review 68.1.
(2016) Review of A. Ziosi, Didone Regina di Cartagine di Chistopher Marlowe: Metafore virgiliane nel Cinquecento (Roma 2015), in Lexis 34, 481-3.
(2016) Review of H. Baltussen and P. J. Davis (eds.) The Art of Veiled Speech: Self-Censorship from Aristophanes to Hobbes (Philadelphia 2015), in Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2016.06.24: http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2016/2016-06-24.html
(2015) Review of N. Horsfall, Virgil Aeneid 6, A Commentary (Berlin 2013), in The Journal of Roman Studies 105: 432-34.
(2014) Review of J. Godwin, Ovid Metamorphoses III An Extract: 511-733 (London and New York 2014), in Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2014.08.06: http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2014/2014-08-06.html

Conferences and Seminars Organised

(2023) Classics and Race, CAAS 2023 Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, 7^thOctober 2023, with J. Murray.
(2023) Classics and Italian Colonialism, Museo delle Civiltà, Roma, 22-24 June 2023, with Samuel Agbamu.
(2023) Classics and Race Seminar, AIA/SCS Annual Meeting in New Orleans, 8^th January 2023, with R. Andújar and J. Murray.
(2019) Virgil and the Feminine, Symposium Cumanum at the Villa Virgiliana in Cuma, 19-22 June 2019, with Victoria Rimell.
(2019) Racing the Classics II, University of Warwick, 3rd May 2019, with Rosa Andújar, Sasha-Mae Eccleston and Dan-el Padilla Peralta.
(2018) Homo bene figuratus inter disciplinas: Methodological Variations on a Single Passage (Vitruvius De Architectura III.1), Penn State University, 7-8 September 2018, with Mathias Hanses and Giovanna Laterza.
(2017) Unspeaking Volumes: Absence in Latin Texts, University of St Andrews, 29 June-1 July 2017, with Tom Geue.
(2016) The Fixed Handout Workshop: Exercises and Variations in Reading Latin Texts, University of Cambridge, 16-17 April 2016; with Siobhan Chomse and William Fitzgerald.

Podcasts and Public-Facing Publications

(2024) ‘Colonialismo, utilizzo ideologico e razzista dell’Antico’, Review of S. Brillante, Anche là è Roma: Antico e antichisti nel colonialismo italiano (Bologna 2023), in AliasD, supplemento culturale de Il Manifesto, 7th January 2024.
(2023) ‘Decolonizzare i Classici o riumanizzarli? A proposito del pamphlet di Maurizio Bettini’, Review of M. Bettini, Chi ha paura dei Greci e dei Romani? Dialogo e cancel culture (Torino, 2023), in AliasD, supplemento culturale de Il Manifesto, 29^th October 2023.
(2023) ‘Colonialismo, L’ambigua classicità dell’Italia occupante’, AliasD, supplemento culturale de Il Manifesto, 23^rd July 2022.
with Ingleheart J, Kearey, T. and Leonard, V. (2022) Pandemic Stories, CUCD Report on the Covid-19 Pandemic.
(2022) ‘Quando l’Atena nera scardinò la Grecia “infanzia dell’Europa”, AliasD, supplemento culturale de Il Manifesto, 28th August 2022: https://ilmanifesto.it/quando-latena-nera-scardino-la-grecia-infanzia-delleuropa
(2021) ‘Centring Africa in Greco-Roman Literature’ (Recorded as part of the Warwick Classics and A.G. Leventis Ancient Worlds Day 2021, 16^th June 2021)
(2021) #AskAnAcademic videos on Virgil’s Aeneid and Dido, for the Warwick Classics Network.
(2020) 'Virgil's Characterisation of Dido' (Recorded as part of the University of Warwick Dept. of Classics and Ancient History Classical Civilisation Teachers Day 2020 for the A-level 'World of the Hero' module)
(2020) 'Race Theory, Critical Race Theory, and the Classics Classroom’ (Cambridge School Classics Project Blog)
(2020) 'Centring Africa in Greek and Roman Literature, while Decolonising the Classics Classroom' (Cambridge School Classics Project Blog)
(2020) The Aeneid: A History (Highlights from Talking History, Irish Radio)
(2019) Guest Speakers interviews for the Module 'Africa and the Making of Classical Literature':
(2017) Hughes, S. ‘Making Rome Great Again: Fake Views in the Ancient World’ in Research Horizons: Pioneering Research from the University of Cambridge 33, 10-11.
(2017) ‘Altar of Facts: Truth and Rumor in the age of Berlusconi,’ in Eidolon.

Teaching and Supervisions

Research supervision:

I am happy to supervise students in Latin literature and its receptions, especially on projects that relate Latin literary texts to political, historical and philosophical thought, and on projects that touch upon comparative literature or classical reception. I am also interested in comparisons between Western and Eastern Classics (I can read and speak Japanese and have some basics of Mandarin Chinese) and in the reception of Greco-Roman literature in Japanese literature and culture.

Upcoming events

31Jan

Classics Beyond the Canon Wikipedia edit-a-thon
06Feb

Private View: A Room of One's Own
20Feb

Twilight at the Museums: Under the Sea

View all events

Not available for consultancy

Affiliations

Classifications:

University and College Teaching Staff

Specialities:

Greek and Latin Literature (A)

Interdisciplinary Studies (X)

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