This September, Dr. Laura Jansen, Associate Professor in Classics & Comparative Literature at the University of Bristol, will be staying at the CHS and consulting the library. Currently, Dr. Jansen is completing a book for Oxford University Press, titled Classical Absences: Antiquity and its Dissemination in Transcultural Modernism. She is the editor of the award-winning Bloomsbury monograph series Classical Receptions in Twentieth-Century Writing, author of Borges Classics: Global Encounters with the Graeco-Roman World (Cambridge, 2018, funded by the Leverhulme Trust), and volume editor of The Roman Paratext: Texts, Frames, Readers (Cambridge, 2014).
While at the CHS, Dr. Jansen will be carrying out research on representations of absence in archaic Greek lyric, early Greek philosophy, and Greek tragedy, as well as in Greek visual and epigraphic media. The research forms a substantial chapter of her book on narratives of classical absence and their dissemination in a variety of twenty and twenty-first century authors, often known for their transcultural reading of Greek antiquity, from Marcel Schwob, Italo Calvino, and Umberto Eco, to Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, Alberto Manguel, and Anne Carson.