Chiara Graf

Chiara Graf is an Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Maryland. She received her BA in Classics from the University of Chicago, followed by a Ph.D from the University of Toronto in 2020. Before arriving at UMD, she held teaching positions at the University of St Andrews and the University of Warwick.

Prof. Graf’s research focuses on Imperial Roman literature. She has spent a lot of time thinking about Seneca the Younger, and particularly about the role of affect and emotion in his literary and philosophical works. Her book, Seneca’s Affective Cosmos: Subjectivity, Feeling, and Knowledge in the Natural Questions and Beyond (OUP 2024), argues that Seneca sees didactic and therapeutic potential in a wide variety of affective states, even ones which would be considered problematic from an orthodox Stoic perspective.   

Her articles and chapters include:

• "Phaedrus's Fables and the Weight of Rule." TAPA (Forthcoming).
• “Archive and Acervus: Heaping Exempla in Valerius Maximus and Frontinus.” Classical Philology (Forthcoming).
• “Boredom in Seneca’s Epistles: Sameness and Stoic Aesthetics.” In A. Elpidorou and J. Ros Velascos (eds.), The History and Philosophy of Boredom, pp. 55-70. Routledge. (2025)
• “Oedipus Haerens: Paranoid Lagging in Seneca’s Phoenissae,” Classical Antiquity (2024): 19-49.
• “The Pleasures of Flattery and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion in Seneca’s Natural Questions (4a. Praef.),” American Journal of Philology 144 (2023): 109-144. [Winner of the AJP Best Article Prize for 2023]

Prof. Graf has taught courses on a wide range of topics, from Classical Mythology to Classical Antiquity and the Cinema, as well as Latin language at all levels.