Hannah Čulík-Baird

Originally from Glasgow, Scotland, I received my BA in Literae Humaniores from Oxford University in 2011 and my Ph.D. in Classics at the University of Southern California in 2017. Following five years with the Department of Classical Studies at Boston University, I joined the Classics Department at UCLA as an Associate Professor in 2022. My first book—Cicero and the Early Latin Poets (Cambridge University Press, 2022)—explored Cicero’s hundreds of quotations of Latin (and Greek) poets across his extensive corpus, studying the historical processes of fragmentation as well as demonstrating the complex intellectual practices which inform Cicero’s engagement with poetry as a historical, linguistic, philosophical, and ethical resource. In my earlier work, I explored the broader implications of fragments in theory and practice—see my lectures: “The Fragment and the Future” (2020), “Sympathy for Fragments?” (2023).

In addition to this first book, my more recent research joins contemporary efforts to address systems of race in the ancient world. In several articles, I have examined Cicero’s characterization of racially and socially marginalized figures in Rome, and have traced evidence of racial thinking in Latin literature from the ancient representation of the Latin comic poet, Terentius Afer (“Terence the African”) to Ovid’s aetiology of blackness in the Metamorphoses. In 2022, Mathias Hanses (Penn State) and I began a collaborative research partnership in which we examine the race-making strategies of Latin texts, particularly in the works of Cicero. The first fruits of our collaboration appeared in 2024 in the form of an article in the special issue of TAPA edited by Sasha-Mae Eccleston and Patrice Rankine which examines Cicero’s efforts to discredit Sardinian witnesses via a series of racializing strategies which make assertions regarding language, skin color, dress, and genetic “mixture” with Africans. Our in-progress book entitled Cicero and the Rhetorics of Race is under contract with Yale University Press.

In addition to my research, since 2020 I have organized an annual online conference—Res Difficiles—addressing inequity in the field of Classics. The Res Difficiles conference series has for several years been a venue for discussing “difficulties” within the field of Classics, examining issues arising out of intersectional vectors of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, class, socio-economic status and beyond. In 2024, we launched Res Difficiles, The Journal—an imprint of Ancient History Bulletin, a Green Open Access Journal—a peer-reviewed publication which invites submissions from individuals, pairs, or groups, addressing “difficult things” within the discipline of Classics and related fields. For further information regarding both the conference and the journal, see: resdifficiles.com.