Irene Peirano
Assistant Professor
She works on Roman poetry and its relation to rhetoric and literary criticism, both ancient and modern. She is especially interested in ancient strategies of literary reception, in notions of authorship in antiquity and in ancient editorial and scholarly practices. Her book on Roman literary fakes — The Rhetoric of the Roman Fake: Latin Pseudepigrapha in context — is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. The study sets authorial and chronological fictions in the context of the practices of impersonation and role-play in the literary culture of the Imperial period, and explores these works as part of the early reception history of canonical authors such as Virgil, Tibullus and Ovid.
Her current research projects include a study of the relationship between rhetoric and poetry in the Imperial period, papers on sphragis in Roman poetry, on the poetics of authorship in Hellenistic epigram and on the cultural history of textual criticism.
Selected Publications
- (In progress) "Ille ego qui quondam: on authorial (an)onymity", in The Author’s Voice in Classical Antiquity, Jonathan Hill and Anna Marmodoro (eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- (Forthcoming) "Authenticity as an aesthetic concept: ancient and modern reflections" in Penn-Leiden Colloquium on ancient values (VI), Aesthetic value in Classical Antiquity, R. Rosen and Ineke Sluiter (eds.). Leiden: Brill.
- (Forthcoming) "Appendix Vergiliana", "Pseudepigrapha", "Plagiarism", "Ethopoeia" in The Virgil Encyclopedia, R. F. Thomas and J. Ziolkowski (eds.). Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.
- "Barbarized Greeks and Hellenized Romans: reading the end of Dionysius of Halicarnassus Antiquitates Romanae", JRS 100 (2010), 1–21.
- "Mutati Artus: Scylla, Philomela and the end of Silenus’ song in Virgil Eclogue 6", CQ 59 (2009), 187–95.
featured Courses This Year
LATN 421
Virgil's Aeneid
FALL 2012 M–W 1–2:15
Skills L5
This course is an advanced level introduction to the Aeneid. We will read the whole poem in translation and the last four books in the original. We will start by reading approximately 60 lines per session working our way up to 150 by the end of the semester. The emphasis throughout will be on comprehension of Virgil’s language, style and poetic technique.
To this end, students will be expected to read the text closely and consult the assigned secondary sources ahead of time. Class discussion will be equally divided between close reading and interpretation of the text and discussion of larger interpretative issues. All secondary readings will be made available on the classesV2 server.
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LATN 455
Martial
Spring 2013, T Th 1-2:15
We will read in full the selection in Watson, L. and Watson, P., Martial: Select Epigrams (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Topics include poetics and the book, sex and gender, politics, the city of Rome and Martial’s role within the history of the epigrammatic genre.
