Simona Martorana, Humboldt Research Fellow (Kiel University and The University of Hamburg)
Chiara Blanco is a Teaching Fellow in Latin at the School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, after taking up a Research Lectureship in Latin Language and Literature at Trinity College, Oxford, and a Lectureship in Classics at Exeter College, Oxford. Her main research interests lie in the intersections between ancient literature (Greek tragedy and Ovid in particular) and medicine, and she has produced several articles on the subject. Her published works include a new interpretation of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis by reading the text side-by-side with Hippocratic treatises (‘Heracles’ itch: The first case of male uterine displacement in Greek literature’, Classical Quarterly, 2020) and a paper on the character of Philomela in Sophocles’ Tereus (‘The Frenzied Swallow: Philomela’s Voice in Sophocles’ Tereus’). She is also co-editor of the Brill’s Companion to the Ancient and Modern Reception of Sappho (forthcoming in 2024), and she is currently working on a monograph on medical influences on Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Allegra Hahn is a PhD student in the Department of Classics, Ancient History, Archaeology and Egyptology at The University of Manchester. She completed her MA in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University. She holds a BSc from Georgetown University, Washington DC, USA, where she studied Classics and Biology. Her research interests are interdisciplinary and lie in the intersection between medicine and literature, especially focusing on the presence of medical knowledge and language in Latin poetry and philosophical prose. Her MA dissertation focused on the use of medical language and medical metaphor in Horace’s poems. More broadly she is interested in Augustan poetry and Neronian literature. Simona Martorana is an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at Kiel University and the University of Hamburg. She completed her PhD in July 2021 at Durham University (UK), after spending some time at Harvard University as a Visiting Fellow. She is a scholar in classical and medieval Latin literature, who combines a rigorous philological reading of the texts with modern theoretical approaches, particularly from gender, posthumanism, medical humanities, and ecocriticism. Her publications include several articles on Latin poetry and medieval Latin philology. She is currently working on a monograph that explores motherhood within Ovid's Heroides through feminist readings.