Professor Irene Peirano Garrison

Professor Irene Peirano Garrison studied at Oriel College, Oxford (B.A. Hons. Literae Humaniores 2002) and Harvard University (Ph.D. Classical Philology 2007). Her main research interests are Latin poetry, Literary Criticism and Rhetorical Theory in Antiquity, Reception Theory and Gender. She works on Roman poetry and its relation to rhetoric and literary criticism, both ancient and modern.  She is especially interested in ancient strategies of literary reception, in notions of authorship in antiquity and in ancient editorial and scholarly practices.

Her current project examines the history of authenticity from the work of Hellenistic scholars on Homer, to the Roman adaptation of this scholarly genre, to the early Christians’ adoption of Alexandrian terminology in discussions of textual fides, authenticity and canon, to nineteenth century re-configuration of this discourse by Lachmann and others. The work seeks to historicize the discourse of the authorial original in a comparative perspective by drawing attention to the discontinuities between the modern philological method and Greco-Roman scholarship.

Since October 2018, she has been a participant in the project Oxford - Yale workshop on Exemplarity, funded by the TORCH International Partnership Scheme.