Notes on Contributors
Rutger J. Allan is a Lecturer in Ancient Greek at the Free University Amsterdam. He has published on a variety of topics in Ancient Greek linguistics relating to verbal semantics, discourse analysis, and pragmatics. He has a special interest in cognitive linguistic and narratological approaches to Greek narrative texts.
Peter Barrios-Lech is Associate Professor of Classics at University of Massachusetts Boston. In his current research, he explores the syntax of Greek and Latin, as well as these languages’ pragmatic and sociolinguistic dimensions.
Luigi Battezzato is Professor of Greek Literature at the Università del Piemonte Orientale, Vercelli (Italy). He is the author of a commentary on Euripides’ Hecuba (Cambridge University Press, 2018), three monographs on Greek poetry (Leggere la mente degli eroi: Ettore, Achille e Zeus nell’Iliade, Pisa 2019, Linguistica e retorica della tragedia greca, Rome 20182; Il monologo nel teatro di Euripide, Pisa 1995), and many papers on ancient Greek literature. He has been visiting professor at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, at the Istituto Universitario di Studi Superiori, Pavia, at the École Normale Supérieure, Lyon, and Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.
Łukasz Berger is an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Classical Philology at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (Poland). His PhD dissertation defended in 2015 examines various pragmatic aspects of the conversation openings in the comedies by Plautus. Currently, he is developing investigation on the language of Roman comedy, applying insights from im/politeness research, speech act theory, and methods of Conversation Analysis. Among his main interest, there are the organisation of talk, phatic routines, and the use of terms of address.
Anna Bonifazi is Professor at the University of Cologne, Institute of Linguistics, Historical-Comparative Linguistics. She applies frameworks from pragmatics, discourse analysis, and cognitive linguistics to ancient Greek literature. The monographs that she published so far discuss deixis and other pragmatic phenomena in Pindar (Mescolare un cratere di canti, 2001), the discourse functions of a few pronouns, particles, adverbs, and a few incongruous utterances in Homer (Homer’s Versicolored Fabric: The Evocative Power of Ancient Greek Epic Word-Making, 2012), and the pragmatics of several particles in Herodotus and Thucydides (Particle Use in Herodotus and Thucydides, 2016). Her current research encompasses anaphoric expressions, discourse segmentation, and multimodality beyond ancient Greek.
Evita Calabrese holds a PhD in Literature and Philology and attained the Italian National Scientific Qualification 2016 for functions as associate professor. She is currently an adjunct professor at the Department of Cultures and Civilisations of the University of Verona. Her research focuses on the application of the pragmatics of human communication to Latin literature She has dedicated two books to Senecan tragedies: Il sistema della comunicazione nella Fedra di Seneca (Palumbo 2009) and Aspetti dell’identità relazionale nelle tragedie di Seneca (Pàtron 2017). She specifically dealt with gestures in a third book, Prospettive relazionali della gestualità nel Satyricon (Pàtron 2019).
Matteo Capponi teaches Ancient Greek at the University of Lausanne. He also provides an initiation to classical texts and mythology at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). He devoted his Ph.D. to Greek tragedy, addressing issues related to anthropology, pragmatics, and kinesics. Today his research focus on the relationship between words and gestures. He is also involved in translating ancient texts to staging, acting, and exploring new ways of teaching classics. In parallel to his academic work, he directs the company STOA, which specialises in the staging of ancient texts (
Evert van Emde Boas is Associate Professor in Classical Philology at the University of Aarhus. He previously held posts at the University of Oxford and at various universities in the Netherlands. His research focuses on the application of modern linguistic and cognitive approaches to Greek literature. He is the lead author of The Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek (CUP 2019), author of Language and Character in Euripides’ Electra (OUP 2017), and co-editor of Characterization in Ancient Greek Literature (Brill 2018).
Severin Hof holds an MA from the University of Zurich (2016). He is a member of the research group on the pragmatics of the dialogue in ancient tragedy that organised the conference from which this volume has originated and is currently finishing his PhD thesis on multiperspectivity in Sophoclean dialogue. His research interests include Greek drama, papyrology, and Medieval Latin, and he has previously published on Sophocles’ Ajax (2019) and on Pindar (2014), as well as edited a documentary papyrus (2017).
Federica Iurescia is SNSF scientific collaborator in the Department of Classics at the University of Zurich. After her studies in Classics at the Universities of Siena and Pisa, she obtained her PhD in 2017 with a dissertation on quarrels in Latin literary texts. Her research interests deal with issue of pragmatics in Latin Literature; she is now working on conversational coherence in tragic dialogues. Her main publication is Credo iam ut solet iurgabit. Pragmatica della lite a Roma (Göttingen, 2019).
Michael Lloyd is Professor of Greek Language and Literature at University College Dublin, Ireland. He is the author of The Agon in Euripides (1992), Euripides’ Andromache: with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary (22005 [1994]), and Sophocles: Electra (2005). He is also the editor of Aeschylus in the Oxford Readings in Classical Studies series (2007), and of articles on Homer, Herodotus, Plato, and Greek tragedy. He has a particular interest in politeness theory.
Gunther Martin has been leading, as an SNSF-Professor, the research group on the pragmatics of the dialogue in ancient tragedy at the University of Zurich that organised the conference from which this volume has originated. He has published an edition and commentary on Euripides’ Ion (Berlin 2018) and books on religion in the Attic orators (Oxford 2009) and the historian Dexippus (Tübingen 2006).
Sandra Rodríguez-Piedrabuena holds an MA from the University of Salamanca (2015) and a PhD on linguistic characterisation in Euripides from the University of Seville (2019), where she has also lectured. Her research interests are Greek Drama and the pragmatics of Greek language. She has previously published contributions on Euripides’ Heraclidae (2019), Plutarch and progymnasmata (2017) as well as on Corinna and Boeotian dialect (2015).
Renata Raccanelli is an associate professor in Latin Language and Literature (University of Verona). Her research interests include archaic theatre (Plautus) and ethico-political thought (Cicero, Seneca, Lucretius), with special focus on the study of relationships (e.g. kinship, amicitia, citizenship) and their symbolic representations in ancient Roman culture. Within such a field, she adopts the lens of the pragmatics of communication in order to examine ancient theories and practices of social exchange and interaction, and in particular the intersection between verbal and non-verbal language (esp. gesture, rhythm of interaction on stage).
Licinia Ricottilli is full professor of Latin language and literature at the University of Verona. She must be credited for her application of pragmatics of communication (a new methodological framework of psychiatric and cybernetic origins) to classical texts starting from 1982. Since the mid-1990’s, she has further developed this method in collaboration with Renata Raccanelli, and later also with Evita Calabrese. Her research areas include the works of Menander, Plautus, Terence, Virgil and Seneca the Younger, as well as fields such as colloquial Latin, gestures, silence and aposiopesis.
Carlo Scardino completed at the University of Basel in 2006 his PhD with a thesis on the speeches in Herodotus and Thucydides (Gestaltung und Funktion der Reden bei Herodot und Thukydides). He also participated in the research Project ‘Iulius Africanus, Kestoi’ (2007–2012). In 2012 he earned his Habilitation at the Philipps-Universität Marburg with an interdisciplinary Graeco-Arabic thesis on the transmission of ancient agricultural writers in Arabic (‘Edition antiker landwirtschaftlicher Werke in arabischer Sprache,’ 2015). Currently, he is working as senior researcher at the University of Düsseldorf in the long-term project ‘Minor and Fragmentary Historians of Late Antiquity’ (KFHist).
Lavinia Scolari holds an MA from the university of Palermo (2009), and a PhD on benefit and revenge in Seneca’s corpus from the University of Siena (2013). Her main research interests are reciprocity and gift-giving in Latin literature and Roman Mythology. On this issue, she has published two books: Doni funesti. Miti di scambi pericolosi nella letteratura latina (Pisa 2018) and Beneficium e iniuria. Rappresentazioni del dono e dell’offesa nel De beneficiis di Seneca (Palermo 2018). Since 2018 she collaborates with the Department of Humanities of the University of Palermo.
Camille Semenzato is a post-doctoral researcher and lecturer at the Universities of Zurich and Neuchâtel (Switzerland). After a PhD on the Muses in Archaic Greece (De Gruyter 2017), she is currently completing a habilitation on Euripides’ Bacchae. Her research focuses on the various forms of inspiration, wisdom and mysteries, in connection with the relation between humans and gods throughout Ancient Greece.
Giada Sorrentino has completed her post-doc research project “Kommunikation, Handlung und Figuren in Euripides’ Tragödie”, supported by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg (Germany). She is author of Comunicazione e relazioni interpersonali nelle commedie di Menandro (Göttingen 2020) and of various articles on Middle and New Comedy.
Luis Unceta Gómez is Associate Professor of Latin at the Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain. His main research interests are Latin semantics and pragmatics, specially speech act theory, pragmatic markers, and linguistic politeness, topics about which he has published a book, La petición verbal en latín. Estudio léxico, semántico y pragmático (2009), and several articles, such as “Congratulations in Latin Comedy: Types and functions” (Journal of Politeness Research, 2016), or “Conceptualizations of Linguistic Politeness in Latin: the Emic Perspective” (Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 2019), among others.
Vanessa Zetzmann studied Greek and Latin at the University of Würzburg and at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. In her Würzburg dissertation, she focused on the portrayal of failing rhetoric in Attic tragedy and spent research stays in Zurich, Pisa and Vandœuvres. Her other research interests include ancient rhetoric and progymnasmata, communication and pragmatics as well as myth and mythopoiesis in Greek literature.