Erika Valdivieso

ON LEAVE AY 2023/2024

Erika Valdivieso specializes in Latin poetry, book history, and the legacies of classical humanism in Spanish and Portuguese America. She holds a BA in Classics and an MAT in Latin from the University of Michigan and earned her PhD in Classics at Brown University. Before coming to Yale, she was a Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Princeton University. Valdivieso is a former fellow of the John Carter Brown Library, a member of the Institute of Andean Studies, and a junior fellow in the Rare Book School’s Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography.

Valdivieso’s current book project draws attention to the relation between education, literature, and imperial imagination in four Latin epics from Iberoamerica. A series of close readings shows how New World epics draw on a rich network of scholarly and pedagogical texts to repackage notions of empire from Virgil’s Aeneid. She is interested in the history of the book in Spanish and Portuguese America and has published on the dissemination and transmission of classical texts in the early modern world. 

She is a cofounder of Hesperides, a scholarly organization which promotes the study of classical reception in the Luso-Hispanic world.

Download CV (PDF — opens in new window)