Virginia Closs

Before earning her PhD, Virginia (Ginna) Closs 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.