Julene Abad Del Vecchio

I am currently a postdoctoral research associate in the Ancient Letter Collections project. I have primarily worked on Statius' Achilleid and its literary tradition. My doctoral research, currently under revision, explores central aspects of the poem that lend themselves to a tragic reading. The Achilleid is seen to offer to the reader darker echoes, alternative paths, conflicting paradoxes, embryonic but very much present in the poem's narrative. A comprehensive mapping of these will result in an expansion of scholarly interpretations.

In addition to the literature of the Flavian period, I am also fascinated by the literary interactions of the Flavian poets with their predecessors (Lucan and Seneca in particular). I am working on Augustan poets too, Virgil (the Aeneid) and Ovid (the Metamorphoses). 

I have also worked on the reception of classical literature within the works of the dramatists of the Spanish Golden Age (especially Tirso de Molina and Calderón de la Barca).

I have been involved in a project of translation and annotation in the Department of Art History at the University of Manchester (https://www.alc.manchester.ac.uk/art-history/research/projects/the-life-of-lambert-lombard/), focused of the inscriptions the Flemish humanist Dominicus Lampsonius composed to accompany the Pictorum Aliquot Celebrium Germaniae Inferioris Effigies, a volume of twenty-three portraits of Netherlandish artists, published in 1572.

Education and qualifications

• AHRC-funded PhD in Classics at the University of Manchester (September 2015 - July 2019)
• MA in Classics & Ancient History at the University of Manchester (September 2014 - September 2015) 

• Alexander Hope Kyd Prize for Outstanding Performance in the MA (2015)
• Conway Memorial Prize for Best Work on Virgil in the MA (2015)