Erika Valdivieso

Erika Valdivieso specializes in Latin poetry, book history, and the legacies of classical humanism in the Americas. Her first book, Empire’s Companion: Virgilian Epics from Iberoamerica (Chicago, 2026) draws attention to the relation between education, literature, and imperial imagination in four Latin epics from colonial Latin America. 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 the Americas and has published on the dissemination and transmission of classical texts in the early modern world. Her next project utilizes poetry from the British, Spanish, and Portuguese Atlantic to trace the untold story of how the Georgics lent itself to aesthetic meditations on and moral challenges to transatlantic slavery. She is a cofounder of Hesperides, a scholarly organization which promotes the study of classical reception in the Luso-Hispanic world.

Monographs

Empire’s Companion: Virgilian Epics from Colonial Iberoamerica. University of Chicago Press.

Articles

• “Virgil in the cane fields,” Classical Antiquity – forthcoming in 2026
• “Beyond absence: slavery and the Georgics,” co-authored with K. Dennis, Classical Antiquity – forthcoming in 2026
• “Searching for Dido in the Latin Epics of Colonial Mexico,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 154, no. 2 (2024): 537-76.
• “Dissecting a Forgery: Petronius, Dante and the Incas,” American Journal of Philology 142, no. 3 (2021): 493-533.
• “The Inca Garcilaso in Dialogue with Neoplatonism,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 37 (2018): 74-85.