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, and engage with a number of particular areas of critical theory: deconstruction, psychoanalysis and the environmental humanities, among others.

Questions of literary revision and authorial drift were the focus of my first book on Ovid (Ovid’s Revisions: the Editor as Author, CUP 2013), while my second (Souvenirs of Cicero: Shaping Memory in the Epistulae ad Familiares, OUP 2024) is a study of the formation and belated cultural meanings of Cicero’s letter collections.

I have also written a short book on Ovid, which surveys recent and imminent approaches to this author’s oeuvre, including the dialogue that one might plot between the Metamorphoses and contemporary lines of environmental criticism. 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 Earth: Tales of Planetary Life and Ruin in the Metamorphoses.

My other (new) interest is the 2nd century CE North African writer, Apuleius. I am currently planning a creative writing project in relation to his Apology, as well as a monograph on The Golden Ass that reads this ancient novel through the lens of queer and postcolonial theory.

I teach graduate and undergraduate courses in Latin language, literature and Roman culture, and try to inflect all my teaching in Classics with ideas, theories and epistemes drawn from other fields and cultures. In Spring 2025, I will be teaching a course on Rome and Africa.

I am on sabbatical until Spring 2025.

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