Adriana Vazquez

I received my BA and MA in Classics from Stanford University in 2009 and 2010 and my Ph.D. in Classics at the University of Washington, Seattle, in 2017. Upon completing my degree, I joined the Department of Classics at UCLA.

While my research interests originate in the poetry of the Augustan period, with particular interest in its interactions with other texts, my current research focuses on reception of Latin literature in lusophone and hispanophone literature of the 17th and 18th centuries. My current book project, tentatively titled Arcadia Ultramarina: Studies in the Neoclassical Literature of Portuguese America, explores the cultural production of the Arcadia Ultramarina, a literary academy working in colonial Brazil in the second half of the 18th century. I am especially interested in questions of bilingual intertextuality and literature produced under the condition of colonialism.

In addition to this book project, I am currently engaged in a collaborative project, together with Leni Ribeiro Leite (University of Kentucky), Beethoven Alvarez (Univrsidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil), and Erika Validivieso (Yale University), to produce a critical edition and the first translation into English for publication of José de Anchieta’s humanist Latin epic on the third governor-general of Brazil, entitled De Gestis Mendi de Saa (1560). The edition is contracted to be published in the Brill Jesuit Studies book series.

In addition to my research, I am the cofounder of a scholarly interest group focusing on Classical legacies in the Ibero-global world, Hesperides: Classics in the Luso-Hispanic World (https://www.hesperideslusohispano.org/). On behalf of Hesperides, I have co-organized panels and workshops at several major conferences around the world, including for the Society for Classical Studies, the Renaissance Society of America, the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry, and the Fédération Internationale des associations d’études classiques.