Academic interests
I am interested in the history and historiography of early Rome and Italy. I have worked particularly in two areas of research.
The first in the representation and conceptualization of the past in the Roman world and beyond. My first book, Monimenta (Rome 2011) concerns the erection of public monuments in mid-republican Rome, and how these monuments are tightly interconnected to the creation of a shared Roman past through the intervention of conflicting agendas of several social and aristocratic groups. I am also interested in Roman historiography, and I published the book Myth and History in the Historiography of Early Rome (2023), co-edited with Tim Cornell and Nicolas Meunier, which attempted to reconsider the complex relationship between different epistemic categories within ancient historiography. I am also a contributor for the second edition of the Brill’s New Jacoby, for which I have written articles and commentaries on Greek and Roman fragmentary historians. Finally, I am interested in how historians before modernity have attempted to write ‘total’ histories encompassing the whole world, and I am one of the general editors of the forthcoming Handbook of Universal History Writing for Oxford University Press.
I am not only interested in ancient historiography, but also in how the reading of ancient historians has shaped the history of knowledge in medieval and early modern Europe. I co-edited with Heather Ellis a special issue of the Intellectual History Review with the title Ancient and Modern Knowledges (2022), which also included two articles written by myself on the reception of Livy and Polybius. Current plans include a monograph that reconsiders how the reading of these texts have prompted at times surprising practices and eccentric theories of modernity, that call attention to the dangers of attributing a concrete value to “modernity” in the history of knowledge.
My other area of research is the history of ancient gods and goddesses, especially in Rome and Italy. This was the topic of my second book, the monograph Fortuna: Deity and Concept in Archaic and Republican Italy (2018), and of the book Gods and Goddesses in Ancient Italy (2019), co-edited with Ed Bispham. I am particularly interested in finding new ways in which we can think of the multiplicity of ancient gods and goddesses, and I firmly believe that historical semantics offer the potential to understand how ancient deities were approached. In the past, I have focused in particular on deities bearing the names of concepts, such as Fortuna, Victoria, Ops, and Salus, but I have started experimenting with deities bearing independent names too, writing essays on Fufluns and Liber in Etruria and Latium, and on the death deity Libitina. Expanding an approach based on historical semantics to other types of deities is part of my current and future research plans, and I am particularly interested in doing so for a series of case studies centred around ancient Campania.
Courses taught
- HIS1200 Special subject – Alexander the Great and the Making of a New World https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/iakh/HIS1200/
- HIS2118 – Rome and the Rise of Its Empire (509–31 BCE) https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/iakh/HIS2118/index.html
- HIS2112 - Imperium Romanum https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/iakh/HIS2112/index.html
- HIS4213 - Greek and Roman Gods and Goddesses https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/iakh/HIS4213/index.html
- HIS4215 - Roma caput mundi https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/iakh/HIS4215/index.html
Background
I am Professor of Ancient History at the University of Oslo (Associate Professor 2020-2022). Before coming to UiO, I held teaching and research positions in Erfurt, Sheffield, Dublin and Oxford. I studied for my undergraduate degree at the ‘Sapienza’ University of Rome, and I did postgraduate studies in Manchester, Paris and Pisa, obtaining my doctorate from the Scuola Normale Superiore (2013), where my supervisors were Carmine Ampolo and Tim Cornell.