Giovanna Ceserani

Giovanna Ceserani, Associate Professor of Classics at Stanford, works on the intellectual history of Classics in the modern age. The Grand Tour Project emerged from her research on eighteenth-century travel to classical lands, on the history of archaeology, and on the place of both the classical ideal and classical remains in the culture and politics of the time. The mining of digital technologies to address historical questions, and the transforming of these results into historiographical argument and narrative continues to be a most rewarding aspect of this project for her.

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 Oxofrd University Press in 2012. Her current book project concerns the emergence of modern histories of ancient Greece; she is now also writing on the transformations of antiquarianism in the eighteenth century and on modern travels to ancient lands. Her interest in travel is engaging new digital approaches with a focus on the Grand Tour for the Stanford digital humanities project Mapping the Republic of Letters (http://republicofletters.stanford.edu/)