Staff profile

Before joining the department in October 2023, I completed my BA and MA in Classics at Pavia University, Italy; in the meantime, I obtained an MA diploma in Humanities from the School for Advanced Studies (IUSS) of Pavia.

My PhD research is founded by the AHRC Northern Bridge Consortium.

Research project

Several studies have long established the influence of Empedocles’ poetry on Latin epic. Applying a literary approach to the study of Empedocles’ reception, these studies have shown that the Empedoclean influence on Latin poems consisted almost exclusively of singular, verbal, allusions. 

My project suggests that a new study on the Empedoclean influence could be successfully carried out, only after the traditional notion of allusion has been superseded by a more flexible approach to intertextuality. In particular, my working hypothesis is that philosophical texts construct their intertextuality in a different way than literary ones; as a consequence, even when a literary work refers to a philosophical text, it can use an allusive strategy which is not typical of literary intertextuality. 

So, my research aims to analyse the way Empedoclean concepts and epistemological methods influenced Latin poems, considering Empeocles’ poem not only as a poetical but also as a dialectical model. More broadly, this research also intends to define a theoretical model for how poetic texts allude to philosophical ones.