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 Roman literature of the 1st century BCE and the 1st century CE, especially the works of Seneca the Younger. She is most interested in how Roman authors negotiate the relationship of knowledge to affect, emotion, and embodiment. How does knowledge make us feel, and to what extent can our feelings give rise to new forms of knowledge? How do Roman authors deal with the intimate relationship of the rational to the affective?

Prof. Graf’s first monograph project, Seneca’s Affective Cosmos: Subjectivity, Feeling, and Knowledge in the Natural Questions and Beyond (OUP, forthcoming in 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. Building upon this interest in ancient feelings, she is currently co-editing (with Adrian Gramps) a volume entitled Affect, Intensity, Antiquity: New Approaches to Ancient Feelings, which showcases the many ways in which affect theory can be brought to bear on the study of ancient literature. Her articles include:

• “Oedipus Haerens: Paranoid Lagging in Seneca’s Phoenissae,” Classical Antiquity (forthcoming in 2024).
• “The Pleasures of Flattery and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion in Seneca’s Natural Questions (4a. Praef.),” American Journal of Philology 144 (2023): 109-144.

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.