
Dr Laura Jansen
MPhil(Oxon.), PhD(Dub.)
Current positions
Associate Professor in Classics & Comparative Literature
Department of Classics & Ancient History
Contact
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Research interests
My areas of research are ancient Greek and Latin languages, literature and philosophy and 20th- and 21st-century experimental compositions (especially literatures from Argentina, Canada, France, Greece, Italy, USA, and Uruguay). I approach this material from comparative and syncretic perspectives, identifying the many classical and modern intersections where it lies and continues to develop.
Much of my current research investigates oblique histories of antiquity and its present-making in the oeuvres of avant-garde authors and practitioners. This is the focus of my new collaborative project, on Oblique Classicisms: Reimagining Reception and its Hidden Histories. I've published on this theme in 'Classical Absences 1899-2017' (CRJ 2021), 'Calvino's Lightness and the Future of Antiquity' (CIS 2023; a publication supported by a BA/Leverhulme Small Grant), and 'Literatura Incompleta: Borges’ Antiquity between World and Universe' (in M. Formisano et al., Labor Imperfectus: Unfinished, Imcomplete, and Partial Texts in Classical Antiquity. De Gruyter, 2024).
I also engage with multimedia contemporary artists, especially those interested in combining their training in the discipline of Classics with artistic composition. On this angle of my research, I am currently completing my next monograph, on Anne Carson and Classics: Indisciplinary Writings on Antiquity (under contract with CUP, with the support of a CHS Research Fellowship, Harvard), and co-editing a volume with V. Lambropoulos, on Chimeric Ecologies: The Poetry of Phoebe Giannisi (for Greek/ Modern Intersections, Michigan UP).
I am the author of Borges' Classics: Global Encounters with the Graeco-Roman World (Cambridge, 2018, funded by the Leverhulme Trust), and volume editor of Susan Sontag's Tangential Classics (OUP, 2025), Anne Carson's Euripides (Classical Antiquity 42:2, 2023), Anne Carson/ Antiquity (Bloomsbury, 2021) and The Roman Paratext: Frame, Texts, Readers (Cambridge, 2014).
Editorial and other activities
I am general editor of the monograph series Classical Receptions in Twentieth-Century Writing (Bloomsbury, Bloomsbury Literary Studies blog).
Fellowships, grants and distinctions
2022-23– Research Fellowship, Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard
2022-23 – University Research Fellowship, Bristol
2023-24 – Judge for the Michael Marks Poetry Awards
2022 – Visiting Professor, Stanford University (Fall Term)
2021-23 – British Academy/ Leverhulme Small Grant
2019 – Visiting Research Grant, Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard
2016 – Visiting Research Grant, Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard
2015-16 – Leverhulme Research Fellowship
2015-16 – Visiting Fellowship, Princeton
Teaching
I teach a range of Greek and Latin units, as well as research-based units for third-year undergraduates, most recently on:
- Greek C/D Choral Song from Lyric to Comedy
- Greek B Sophocles' Antigone
- Latin C/D Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid, Manilius
- Philosophies of Eros: Ancient & Modern
- Classics & Comparative Literature
- Classical Literature & Environmental Philosophy
See webpage for more information.
Projects and supervisions
Research projects
Oblique Classicisms: Reimagining Classical Reception and its Hidden Histories
Principal Investigator
Description
Classical Reception Studies is generally centred on the idea of ‘relevance’, focusing on areas or texts from antiquity that clearly impact modernity. Indirect classical links and undercurrents are typically…Managing organisational unit
Dates
01/03/2023 to 01/03/2027
Classics between Science and Literature: Italo Calvino
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
Department of Classics & Ancient HistoryDates
01/08/2020 to 31/07/2023
Classical Receptions in Twentieth-Century Writing
Principal Investigator
Description
Monograph series for Bloomsbury Publishing; Series EditorManaging organisational unit
Department of Classics & Ancient HistoryDates
01/09/2015
Thesis supervisions
Literary portraits and landscapes
Supervisors
Human and Nonhuman Experience of Water in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Alice Oswald’s Dart
Supervisors
In defence of freedom of choice
Supervisors
'The water and the swimmer'
Supervisors
Human and Divine Agency with respect to Time in the Poetry of Horace and Prudentius
Supervisors
Publications
Selected publications
15/10/2023Lightness and the Future of Antiquity in Lezioni americane
California Italian Studies
Susan Sontag's Tangential Classics
Susan Sontag's Tangential Classics
Recent publications
12/03/2025Sontag and the Archaeology of a Tangential Classics
Susan Sontag's Tangential Classics
The Library of Dreams
Susan Sontag’s Tangential Classics
Chimeric Ecologies
Chimeric Ecologies
Susan Sontag's Tangential Classics
Susan Sontag's Tangential Classics
With Archilochus 'Cicada'
Chimeric Ecologies: The Poetry of Phoebe Giannisi