Dr Laura Jansen

Webpage

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

See webpage for more information.