I studied at the University of Florence, Italy, before receiving my PhD in Classics from Rutgers University in 2002. I have taught at Hofstra University since then, before joining Princeton in 2024. In my time at Hofstra, where I founded and directed the Classics Program, I developed a keen interest for the different ways ancient languages have been and may be taught. As Director of the Classics Language Program at Princeton, I continue my research in, and experimentation with language pedagogy.

As a scholar of Latin literary culture, I specialize in intertextuality, with a particular interest in the role that poetic allusions play in Latin prose. My first book, The Art of Pliny’s Letters (Cambridge 2008) details this phenomenon by mapping the open or subtle references to Catullus, Horace, Vergil, and Ovid that Pliny disseminated at crucial moments in his private correspondence. On the same topic, I also edited a volume of essays entitled Pliny the Book-Maker: Betting on Posterity in the Epistles (Oxford 2015).  More recently, I have shifted the focus of my research to investigating the cultural construction of social identities in the Roman world. I have dedicated to this topic my latest book, Women in Martial: A Semiotic Reading (Oxford 2024), which takes Martial’s adherence to the distinctively Roman representation of women as signs of their male counterparts (whether fathers, husbands, sons or lovers) as a case study of cultural semiotics in the Flavian age.

In collaboration with my husband, Professor Simone Marchesi (French and Italian), I am currently working on a commentary on Aeneid 6. We are part of an international team, which will eventually produce a full commentary of Vergil’s epic for the Italian series of Greek and Latin writers of the Fondazione Lorenzo Valla.

Teaching Interests:

In my career, I have taught a wide array of courses including Roman literature and social history, comparative approaches to Greek and Roman mythology, epic, and novel, as well as classes devoted to ancient drama and its contemporary staging, gender and sexuality in the ancient Mediterranean world, and the city of Pompeii. In the past, close readings of Latin and Greek texts formed the backbone of my pedagogy, whether I taught literary works in translation or exposed medical school students to the Greek and Latin roots of scientific terminology. The same attention to and love for the languages informs my teaching of Greek and Latin at all levels here at Princeton.