Alessandro Schiesaro

Alessandro Schiesaro is Head of School and Professor of Classics. He studied in Pisa as a scholar of the Scuola Normale Superiore (Laurea, Diploma and PhD), at Berkeley (MA) thanks to a Fulbright Fellowship, and at Oxford.

His teaching career began as Assistant Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and he subsequently held chairs of Classics at Princeton, where he was also Director of Graduate Studies in Classics, of Latin Language and Literature at King’s College London and of Latin Literature at Sapienza University of Rome, where he was the Founding Director of the Sapienza School for Advanced Studies.

While at King’s he served as Head of Department and Deputy Head of School and also as chair of the University of London’s Subject Panel in Classics. He headed the Technical Secretariat for Research in Italy’s Ministry of Education from 2008 to 2015 and was a member of the EU’s High Level Group on the Modernisation of Higher Education.

His main fields of interest include Latin literature, literary theory, psychoanalysis and cultural history; he is especially fascinated by the interaction between poetry and philosophy and by the role of poetry as purveyor of knowledge. His work so far focuses mostly on Lucretius, Virgil, Horace, Ovid and Seneca, and he has also published on Statius, Apuleius and Leopardi.

He edits the Classical journal MAIA – Rivista di Literature Classiche - and is a member of the editorial board of Dictynna, Materiali e Discussioni per l’Analisi dei Testi Classici and Studi Italiani di Filologia Classica. He is a member of Academia Europaea. He has been a Visiting Professor at Stanford and has lectured extensively in Europe and the US.