About

Barbara Graziosi is the Ewing Professor of Greek Language and Literature at Princeton University, where she also chairs the Classics Department. Her research focuses on ancient Greek literature and the ways in which different readers across time and the globe interpret and make it their own, emphasizing the relationship between the classical and the familiar. She has developed two major research projects: the first, originating at the University of Durham and funded by the European Research Council, explores how representations of ancient Greek and Roman poets reflect their audiences and readers rather than the poets themselves. Her work in this area includes her first book, 'Inventing Homer: The Ancient Reception of Epic,' and collaborative projects such as 'Homer: The Resonance of Epic' and 'Homer in the Twentieth Century.' Her recent monograph project, 'Sappho, Networked,' continues this exploration. The second major project, 'Logion: Machine Learning for Greek Philology,' intersects Classics and Computer Science and is funded by Magic Grant from the Princeton Humanities Council. It aims to utilize machine learning to analyze and interpret ancient texts, focusing on detecting textual corruptions, filling lacunae, and exploring language processing limits. Her approach emphasizes care, curation, love, and criticism, inspired by thinkers like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, bell hooks, and Donna Haraway. This perspective informs her work on classical texts and material remains, including her co-authored book 'Classics, Love, Revolution,' which examines a nineteenth-century love story through a queer, southern-Italian lens. Graziosi is also engaged in public scholarship, authoring 'The Gods of Olympus: A History,' which traces the evolution of Olympian gods from antiquity to the Renaissance, and participating in various media programs connecting antiquity to contemporary issues. She has contributed reviews to prominent publications and has been involved in broadcasting for BBC, French and Italian television, and the US History Channel. Educated in Trieste, Oxford, and Cambridge, she has taught at Oxford and Durham before joining Princeton in 2018. At Princeton, she serves on the Research Advisory Board of Princeton Language and Intelligence and the Editorial Board of Princeton University Press. She holds a National Teaching Fellowship and an Excellence in Doctoral Supervision Award, and she is interested in advising students on Greek literature, its reception, machine learning applications in philology, and authorship and autobiography as modes of engaging with ancient texts.

Research topics

• Philosophy
• Political Science
• Literature
• History
• Computer Science
• Epistemology
• Sociology
• Art
• Law
• Art history
• Mathematics
• Theology
• Linguistics
• Physics
• Classics
• Astronomy

Selected publications

• An Annotated Dataset of Errors in Premodern Greek and Baselines for Detecting Them

  2025-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Creston Brooks, Johannes Haubold, Charlie Cowen-Breen, Jay White, Desmond DeVaul, Frederick Riemenschneider, Karthik R Narasimhan, Barbara Graziosi. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025. 2025.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-11-25

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• List of Illustrations

  2024-05-07

  otherSenior author

  Subject Classical Literature Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

  PublisherDOI

• Luigi Settembrini, According to His Wife

  2024-05-07

  book-chapterSenior author

  Abstract Settembrini’s wife, Raffaella (‘Gigia’) Faucitano, played a crucial role in establishing Settembrini’s public persona, as well as supporting him through his long incarceration and, probably, saving his life. This chapter offers a moving portrait of their relationship and shows that they, in turn, established excellent relationships with a wide range of other actors: fellow revolutionaries, Piedmontese aristocrats, Black sailors, British statesmen, classical scholars, and common criminals. Classical scholarship often provided a link: Settembrini’s connection to William Ewart Gladstone is important in this regard—and is also relevant to current debates in postcolonial criticism. Settembrini, Faucitano, and other subaltern figures affected shifts in imperial British politics at a level of power very far removed from their conditions. Overall, this chapter places Settembrini’s autobiographical writing and Faucitano’s own writing and shaping of his life within a complex network of relationships, showing how autobiography was used for the purposes of revolution and, later, nation-building.

  PublisherDOI

• How to Live and How to Read

  2024-05-07

  book-chapterSenior author

  Abstract This chapter presents Sedgwick’s reparative reading as a way of living. It begins with Settembrini’s legacies. First, his scholarship: the reason why he recognized the significance of Lucian and the Greek novel, identifying in them a popular form of Platonism long before this became recognized in mainstream scholarship, reflects his egalitarian stance in matters political and sexual. His stance also aligns with contemporary insights into the many ways revolutions fail women and ethnic minorities. Settembrini’s view that, in love, ‘those who are strong … are almost always unjust’ also aligns with bell hooks’s ‘without justice there can be no love’. Shame, Sedgwick argues, stems from ‘the incomplete reduction of interest or joy’. It can happen, then, that as readers we are ashamed of our own curiosity and pleasures. Capra and Graziosi expose their own pleasures in discovering Settembrini and show how Settembrini in turn chose to reveal himself.

  PublisherDOI

• Dedication

  2024-05-07

  book-chapterSenior author

  Extract To our mothers Maria Grazia Bosi (Modena, 14 June 1938–Milano, 4 November 2021) Marina Tarabocchia (Karachi, 30 November 1939–Trieste, 28 December 2020) in memory of their sense of humour, spirit of irreverence, and love

  PublisherDOI

• The Neoplatonists

  2024-05-07

  book-chapterSenior author

  Abstract After establishing a mode of reading Settembrini’s works of Platonic fiction by paying attention to planted allusions and clues in chapter 6, Capra and Graziosi apply the same approach to The Neoplatonists and discover a passage that was, up to now, taken to be a misquotation or invention but which, they show, is a precise allusion to a specific sentence in Plato. This key insight shows the connections between a fiction set in ancient Greece, an intellectual disagreement with ascetic Platonism, and a firm commitment to embodied happiness. It is also a precise recollection of the most dramatic episode in Settembrini’s own life. Beyond the influence of Plato, this chapter demonstrates the importance of Cuoco’s Plato in Italy for Settembrini: that work suggested a specific mode of engagement with classical literature and a path towards the political and intellectual emancipation of the Italian south—via the legacies of Greece.

  PublisherDOI

• The Intervention

  2024-05-07

  book-chapterSenior author

  Abstract Capra and Graziosi outline their intervention: Settembrini helps them discuss the new nationalisms, as well as other forms of identity politics, and their impact on classical scholarship. Because Settembrini’s legacies were split between the nationalist revolutions of 1848 and the sexual revolutions of the 1970s, Capra and Graziosi begin by reuniting different aspects of his thought. Then, making use of Cassin on the dedicated comparative, Latour on postcritique, Haraway on care, and Sedgwick on reparative reading, they comment on their own situatedness and their trust in what remains of the past in the present. In response to Murnaghan’s question whether, when we study how antiquity was received, ‘reception gets sole credit for determining meaning, with no contribution from the ancient object being received’, they argue for the authentic presence of classical antiquity in our world—even in the case of an anachronistic fake like The Neoplatonists.

  PublisherDOI

• Luigi Settembrini, According to Himself

  2024-05-07

  book-chapterSenior author

  Abstract This chapter, the first in Part I ‘Autobiography and Revolution’, starts by showing that, in the Risorgimento, personal memoir and adventurous fiction played an outsized role in inspiring revolutionary action. A systematic comparison between The Neoplatonists and Settembrini’s Memoirs then uncovers close parallels between the two, showing that, for Settembrini, the past was a source of happiness, a place where recollections of early childhood and memories of ancient Greece blended into one uncorrupted sense of wonder and wellbeing. The classical past not only provided inspiration for the utopian future, but offered a means of building resilience in the present, which was marked by political failure, near execution, incarceration, fear, and physical pain. Nostalgia, in other words, was an important resource, motivating revolutionary action and the ability to withstand its consequences.

  PublisherDOI

• The <i>Dialogue on Women</i>

  2024-05-07

  book-chapterSenior author

  Abstract Settembrini’s ‘Platonic fictions’ are the subject of Part II; chapter 6 focuses on the early Dialogue on Women. The circumstances in which it was written (during Settembrini’s first incarceration) are documented, as is the influence of Gigia Faucitano on its contents. Like The Neoplatonists, the Dialogue leverages the classical past in order to suggest new bonds of equality, justice, and love. The two works share key concerns, most obviously the intellectual education of women and the sexual education of men. Capra and Graziosi show, for the first time, how closely the Dialogue on Women is structurally modelled on Plato’s Phaedrus (a key text also for The Neoplatonists as they go on to argue in chapter 7). The Dialogue stages a battle between the ancients and the moderns in which Plato’s arguments about the equality of women in the Republic are pitched against the positions of Rousseau, whom Settembrini (rightly) castigates for sacrificing women as collateral in establishing democratic relationships among men.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Johannes Haubold

  15 shared

• Andréa Capra

  12 shared

• Emily Greenwood

  6 shared

• Luigi Carmignani

  3 shared

• Alison Keith

  3 shared

• Robert Shorrock

  3 shared

• Charlie Cowen-Breen

  3 shared

• Rex Winsbury

  3 shared

Awards & honors

• National Teaching Fellowship
• Excellence in Doctoral Supervision Award