Giovanna Ceserani

Giovanna Ceserani works on the classical tradition with an emphasis on the intellectual history of classical scholarship, historiography and archaeology from the eighteenth century onwards. She is interested in the role that Hellenism and Classics played in the shaping of modernity and, in turn, in how the questions we ask of the classical past originate in specific modern cultural, social and political contexts.

Her book Italy’s Lost Greece: Magna Graecia and the making of modern archaeology appeared from Oxford University Press in 2012. She is working now on two book projects; the first concerns the emergence of modern histories of ancient Greece, and the second on modern travels to ancient lands. Her interest in travel is engaging new digital approaches with a focus on eighteenth-century travel to Italy: she was a founding member of the Stanford digital project Mapping the Republic of Letters, and is director of the Stanford digital project The Grand Tour Project