Virginia Closs

Virginia (Ginna) Closs holds a B.A. in Classics from Stanford University, an M.Phil in Classical Art and Archaeology from Cambridge University (where she was a member of Newnham College) and a Ph.D. in Classical Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Before earning her Ph.D., she spent five years teaching high school Latin. Her research focuses primarily on Latin literature and Roman cultural history during the early imperial period, with a particular interest in how Latin texts reflect notions of material culture, urban space, and temporality. Other research interests include Latin epigraphy and Latin pedagogy. 

Prof. Closs' first book, While Rome Burned: Fire, Leadership, and Urban Disaster in the Roman Cultural Imagination (University of Michigan Press, 2020), examines the role of fire as a metaphor for political instability in literary texts from the mid-first century BCE through the early second century CE. With UMass Classics Professor emerita Elizabeth Keitel, she also has published a co-edited volume, Urban Disasters and the Roman Imagination (De Gruyter, 2020). Contributors to this volume examine the varying ways in which urban disasters, such as the Great Fire of 64 CE, the Vesuvian destructions of 79 CE, and the Roman attacks on foreign cities such as Carthage and Jerusalem functioned within both the lived reality and the literary consciousness of inhabitants of the Roman world.

• “Parce, Pater: Martial’s ‘Augustan’ Commentary on Domitianic Rome in Ep. 5.7,” in Domitian’s Rome and the Augustan Legacy, eds. Marcello Mogetta and Raymond Marks (2020). University of Michigan Press, 141-57.

• “Burn after Reading: Literary Fires and Literary Memory in Tacitus' Annals.” Illinois Classical Studies 45.1 (2020): pp. 110-131

• “The Unmaking of Rome: Nero, Seneca, and the Fire(s) of 64,” in Urban Disasters in the Roman Imagination, eds. Virginia Closs and Elizabeth Keitel (2020). De Gruyter (Trends in Classics), 155–80.

• “X Fiddled While Y Burned: Examples of History’s Hottest Meme, Ranked.” Eidolon, February 28, 2020.

• “Neronianis Temporibus: The So-Called Arae Incendii Neroniani and the 64 Fire in Rome’s Monumental Landscape,” Journal of Roman Studies 106 (2016): pp. 102-123