Francesca Martelli

A photo of Francesca Martelli
E-mail: fmartelli@humnet.ucla.edu Phone: 310-825-1101 Office: Dodd Hall 289E

I joined the UCLA faculty in 2013, after holding temporary teaching posts in the UK, and having studied at Trinity College Dublin, where I received my BA, and at Oxford, where I received my DPhil. My interests range widely over Latin literature, but engage with particular areas of critical theory: deconstruction, psychoanalysis and, more recently, the environmental humanities.

Questions of authorship were the focus of my first book on Ovid (Ovid’s Revisions: the Editor as Author, CUP 2013), which explored the multivalence and deferred meanings that this author builds into and across his oeuvre by advertising his editorial interventions. My most recent book (Souvenirs of Cicero: Shaping Memory in the Epistulae ad Familiares, now in press with OUP) is a study of the formation and cultural meanings of Cicero’s letter collections. It focuses on the forms of retrospective rewriting to which these collections submit their contents, and considers the consequences that this mode of belated reappraisal holds for articulating certain kinds of historical juncture both within Roman culture and beyond it.

I have also written a short book on Ovid, which surveys recent and imminent approaches to this author’s oeuvre, including the fruitful dialogue that one might plot between the Metamorphoses and contemporary lines of ecocritique. I have pursued that very dialogue in a volume of essays co-edited with Giulia Sissa on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Environmental Imagination (Bloomsbury, 2023). And I continue exploring it further in my current book project, Ovid’s Anthropocenes.

I have also recently started working on the 2nd century CE North African writer, Apuleius, and am currently working on a creative writing project in relation to his Apology.

I teach graduate and undergraduate courses in Latin language, literature and Roman culture, including its reception in cinema with the GE Classics 42

Books

Articles

  • ‘Multispecies temporalities and Roman Fasti in Ovid’s Metamorphoses,’ in F. Martelli and G. Sissa (eds.) Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Environmental Imagination, Bloomsbury (forthcoming)
  • ‘The Spectral Life of Friends: Derrida, Cicero, Atticus (Cicero ad Atticum 1),’ in S. Gurd and M. Telò (eds.) The Before and The After, Tangent (forthcoming)
  • ‘Letters to the Editor: a reading of ad Fam. 16′, in C. Coombe, T. Geue and F. Middleton (eds.) Between Readers, Writers and Texts in Imperial Literature, Cambridge (forthcoming)
  • (2018) ‘Ennius’ imago between tomb and text’, in N. Goldschmidt and B. Graziosi (eds.) The Tomb of the Poet, Oxford, pp. 69-82
  • (2017) ‘The Triumph of Letters: Rewriting Cicero in ad Fam. 15′, Journal of Roman Studies 107
  • (2016) ‘Introduction’, Arethusa 49.3: 393-7
  • (2016) ‘Mourning Tulli-a: the shrine of letters in ad Atticum 12’, Arethusa 49.3: 415-37
  • (2011) ‘Empire and the Limits of Analogy: Aztecs and Romans in Malibu’, review article in Arethusa 44.2: 245-50
  • (2010) ‘Signatures Events Contexts: Copyright at the End of the First Principate’, Ramus 39.2: 130-59
  • (2009) ‘Plumbing Helicon: Poetic Property and the Material World of Statius’ Silvae’, Materiali e Discussioni 62: 145-77

Upcoming Talks

‘Lichas and the Ovidian Anthropocene,’ SCS Meeting (San Francisco), January 2022