Joint PhD with La Sapienza – Università di Roma. This research project explores the relationship between holiness and political power in a selection of lives of saints preserved in Syriac hagiographical collections. It is based on the philological study of both these writings and the manuscripts in which they are preserved, and analyses the ideological reasons according to which the collections were formed in the course of time.

While the ancient Greek novels have been shown to absorb preceding Greek and eastern traditions, not much systematic attention has been paid to how they use, address or confront preceding Latin traditions. This project is designed to fill this gap, a course of action supported (even invited) by recent scholarship that (rightly) challenges unidirectional conceptualizations of the influence of Greek on Latin literature. This project aims at a systematic analysis of the presences (in different forms) of a number of Latin literary genres in the Greek novels that have come down to us (i.e. the five extant novels, the fragments and a number of so-called ‘fringe novels’). The driving research hypothesis is that Greek novels to varying degrees and in different ways address, respond to and make creative use of not just Greek and eastern narrative traditions but also of Latin ones, and, more specifically, that they use Latin narrative traditions in order to (a) conceptualize the intertwined notions of love and heroism, and (b) develop metaliterary thoughts about the generic encoding underlying these notions. Its method is defined by three stages: (1) taking stock of overlaps, (2) interpreting/conceptualizing them, and exploring metaliterary strategies. Given the project’s approach, it impacts the study of both Greek and Latin (meta)literature, and that of fiction.

A literary-rhetorical analysis of speeches, essays and biographies from the Second Sophistic (50-250 AD) will test the hypothesis that democratic elements in politics in Greek cities continued to exist under Roman imperial rule. This hypothesis challenges a long-standing and influential common opinion among both literary scholars and ancient historians. The methodology combines ancient rhetoric and New Historicism.

This project seeks to examine the literary representation of performance in Greek late antique hagiographical Lives of 'saints in disguise' (4th-10th c.), holy types that are usually not studied together but that may arguably be compared on the basis of their adoption of a false identity. Among them are Lives of cross-dressers, of holy fools, and of other saints who take on other forms of disguise. The project investigates the narrative strategies that are used in these stories to represent disguise and theatrical performance, characteristics which are not readily associated with saints and holiness. More specifically, the project examines aspects of the saint’s performance vis-à-vis other characters as well as aspects of the text’s performance vis-à-vis the reader and its narrative effects. By highlighting fictional aspects of the texts, the project aims to show also that the theme of disguise was sought out for its narrative qualities and entertaining effect as much as its edifying value.