Giovanna Ceserani is an Associate Professor of Classics at Stanford University. She works on the classical tradition with an emphasis on the intellectual history of classical scholarship, historiography and archaeology from the eighteenth century onwards. She is interested in the role that Hellenism and Classics played in the shaping of modernity and, in turn, in how the questions we ask of the classical past originate in specific modern cultural, social, and political contexts.
Giovanna is also the Director of the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA).
SHC Project
A Sicilian Journey: In Search of the Cosmopolitan Enlightenment
The project began with my chance discovery of an anonymous manuscript detailing a 1766 trip to Sicily. These men traveled together in South Italy not as tourists observing a land of ancient greatness and present decline, but as scholars seeking to engage with a modern world of prisons and hospitals alongside of antiquities and natural wonders, all comprehended in terms of shared, up-to-date knowledge and progressive ideals. Through a vividly contextualized description of their joint travels, my book rethinks the usual separation between Italians and foreign travelers that is definitive of so many Grand Tour narratives, while making the case for a biographical and microhistorical approach to the history of ideas. In the process, South Italy in the late eighteenth century is revealed as a site of significant and fruitful cross-national exchange.