Frances Bernstein *22

I received my bachelor’s degree in Classics from the University of Chicago in 2016 and joined Princeton’s Department of Classics in the same year. My undergraduate thesis examined Vergil’s abrupt silence at the end of the Aeneid alongside the metacommentary on failed speech in the poem’s final simile. My main research interests lie in Latin poetry and poetics, with a particular focus on the poetry of the late Roman Republic and early Principate. I am also interested in the intersection of visual and literary culture in the Augustan period, and my previous work has examined how poetic techniques might inform our study of cultural resonance and ideological transmission in the visual sphere.

My dissertation, titled “Sites of Silence: Poetry at the Boundary in Vergil’s Aeneid,” examines how Vergil aligns the metaphor of liminal space and boundaries (both physical and psychological) with the boundaries of speech and song in the Aeneid, with the goal of developing a clearer understanding of how Vergil conceptualizes the limits of interpretation and of his own poetic voice in his epic.