Dr Elena Giusti

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).

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.