Current Fellows

Nicoletta Bruno has worked as a Research Fellow at the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, LMU Munich, the Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg Greifswald, the University of Innsbruck, and as a Teaching Fellow in Latin Literature at the University of Bari ‘Aldo Moro’. She is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Liverpool and an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, UK. Her main research interests include Latin Epic Poetry, Ancient Historiography, Latin Lexicography, the Classical Tradition, and Renaissance Humanism. She has authored several peer-reviewed articles and books, including a commentary on Lucretius, De rerum natura 5, 1110–1349 (Nordhausen, 2020) and an edited volume, Archaeologies, Origins, Antiquities: Narrating Early Cultural History in Ancient Greece and Rome (Berlin/Boston, forthcoming).

During her time in Basel, Nicoletta’s primary objective has been to finalize the book proposal for a monograph tentatively entitled The Rhetoric of Silence in Tacitus: Narrative Forms and Unspoken Expressions of Power. Her research offers a comprehensive exploration of silence as a central thematic, rhetorical, and narrative tool in Tacitus’ works, examining the function of silence in revealing the complex interplay of power structures and manipulation strategies characteristic of that era. Through a thorough analysis of Tacitus’ use of silence, the project illustrates its varied roles as markers of power, respect, vulnerability, and distress, portraying the psychological and political dynamics within the imperial court.

Nicoletta Bruno's fellowship in Basel took place from from 24 February to 5 May 2025.

Scott DiGiulio is an associate professor of Classics at Mississippi State University, where he is also a research associate of the Cobb Institute of Archaeology. He holds degrees from Harvard University and Brown University (PhD 2015). His research explores the intersection of Roman literature, ancient scholarship, and reading practice, focusing on imperial Greek and Latin prose. His first book, Reading Miscellany in the Roman Empire: Aulus Gellius and the Imperial Prose Collection (Oxford 2024), examines how an ancient reader could make sense of a fragmentary and disordered work such as Gellius’ miscellany, the Noctes Atticae, and interprets the work as a fundamentally literary collection that offers a profound meditation on the experience of reading and literary culture at the height of the Roman Empire. Incorporating inter- and intratextual analyses alongside narratologically informed readings, it investigates the strategies used by Gellius to provide a framework for treating miscellany seriously and on its own terms as an artistic literary form.

In the framework of the Basel Fellowship in Latin Literature, Scott worked on his second book, provisionally titled Verba aliena: Quotation as Discursive Practice in Roman Literature. This book aims to reevaluate the use of direct quotation in Roman authors of the late Republic and Empire, understanding their use of earlier poetry and other literature as a vital communicative aspect of these authors’ processes of negotiating both their own literary identities and the broader definition of what it means to be learned in the ancient Mediterranean world. While allusion and imitation are understood as spaces for literary virtuosity, quotation has been relegated to the realm of unimaginative compilation, viewed as the practice of ancient scholars more interested in collecting the words of others than in creating literature of their own. However, through a survey of authors including Cicero, Varro, Seneca the Younger, Suetonius, and Athenaeus, this book argues that ancient authors understood their use of quotation as integral to their own projects, productively exploiting the interactions between source texts and new contexts.

Scott DiGiulio's fellowship in Basel took place from 2 March to 17 May 2025.

Christopher van den Berg has been a faculty member at Amherst College (Massachusetts) since 2010. He received his B.A. from UC Berkeley and his Ph.D. from Yale University, held an NEH Fellowship at the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae in Munich, and has studied or taught in Mexico, Italy, Germany, and France. His research focuses on Greco-Roman rhetoric, the poetics of prose genres, the reception of ancient political rhetoric into the modern day, literary criticism, including the evaluation of visual media as a critical idiom for judging literature, and comparative literary systems. His first book, The World of Tacitus’ Dialogus de Oratoribus: Aesthetics and Empire in Ancient Rome, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2014. His second book, The Politics and Poetics of Cicero’s Brutus: The Invention of Literary History, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2021.

During the research stay, Chris worked on his current book project, Critical Matter: Performance, Identity, and Object in Greco-Roman Criticism. This book offers an interpretive survey of Roman literary and rhetorical criticism. It argues that an author’s explicit discussion of how to judge and categorize literature can only be understood in light of the employment and manipulation of literary values within that same author’s text. Critical Matter uncovers two distinct yet interrelated features of criticism: its complexity as an artistic genre and the crucial role of material and visual culture for its analyses. The authors studied extend from Plato and Aristotle through the key authors of the Second Sophistic and Late Antiquity, such as Dio Chrysostom and Optatian.

Christopher van den Berg's fellowship in Basel took place from 17 March to 14 June.

Jared Hudson is associate professor of Classics at Harvard University. He holds degrees from Yale College, the University of Cambridge, and the University of California, Berkeley (PhD 2013). His primary research interests and teaching experience are broadly centered on Latin prose literature and its cultural contexts, especially of the late republic and early principate. His first book, The Rhetoric of Roman Transportation: Vehicles in Latin Literature  (Cambridge 2021), examines the cultural poetics of modes of transport in Latin literary texts, revealing the distinct roles played by particular conveyances across a broad range of authors and genres. He is interested more generally in marginal and “minor” Latin texts (or those of otherwise contested canonicity), having written most recently on Florus, Varro, Nepos, and the Appendix Sallustiana.

With the support of the Basel Fellowship in Latin Literature, Jared Hudson is working on his current book project, provisionally titled Writing Latin Geography: Pomponius Mela’s Peripheral Vision, a project that grows from his interest in under-explored texts but also draws on ongoing interests in spatial representation in Latin texts, Latin technical literature, and ancient Latin and Greek literary cultures of epitome. Writing Latin Geography is a literary and cultural study of Latin geographical writing with a special focus on the once-canonical, now largely neglected first-century CE epitome, De Chorographia. It argues that Mela’s distinctive variety of geographical epitome, articulated in highly artistic rhetorical Latin prose, represents an important cultural shift in unofficial Roman representations of the layout of the known (and less-known) world. The project aims to reevaluate an underexamined but unique work of great significance for the development of Latin geographical writing and Roman conceptions of global space.

Jared Hudson's fellowship in Basel took place from 28 April to 3 July 2022.

PD Dr. Ute Tischer is a Senior Researcher at Technische Universität Dresden where she is currently developing digital models for the study of invective in Latin literature. Her previous research focused on the commentaries and scholia on ancient poetry, in particular the exegetical tradition on Vergil, as well as central concepts of literary criticism and poetics, including allusion, quotation, context and authorship. In her Habilitation entitled Zitat und Markierung. Signalisieren und Erfassen von Zitaten in römischer Prosa which she is currently preparing for publication in the Hypomnemata series (V&R, Göttingen), she examines the concepts and norms that govern quotation in various Roman prose authors such as Cicero, Suetonius and Aulus Gellius. She has co-edited various collections, including ut pictura poeta. Author Images and the Reading of Ancient Literature  (Turnhout, forthcoming 2022).

In the framework of the Basel Fellowship in Latin Literature Ute Tischer will investigate the reception of Horace’s Ars poetica in Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria. Her study takes as its starting point the quotation from Ars poetica in Quintilian’sprefatory epistle, with which Quintilian seems to invoke Horatian principles for his own prose work; indeed, a number of allusions and quotations throughout the Institutio show that Quintilian’s engagement with the poem crucially informs the structure and conceptual framework of his systematic treatise on oratory. In her study, Ute Tischer not only sheds light on the ways in which Quintilian reads the Ars poetica but also shows how much influence his reading has had on the history of the interpretation and reception of this difficult and perplexing poem to this day.

Ute Tischers's fellowship in Basel took place from 15 August to 13 November 2022.