Center for the Study of the Early Modern World

Andrew Laird came to Brown in 2016 from Warwick University in the UK, where he was Professor of Classical Literature. His research interests extend beyond ancient Greece and Rome to the European Renaissance and colonial Latin America. He is completing a project on the role of humanism in mediating native languages and legacies in sixteenth-century New Spain and also preparing a text and translation of Petrarch's Africa for the I Tatti Renaissance Library. He has recently held a Plumer Visiting Research Fellowship at St Anne's College, Oxford, taught at the Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas at UNAM (Mexico) and directed a Folger Institute Faculty Seminar, The Visual Art of Grammar. Activities in 2021 have included talks for the 'World Republic of Letters' lecture series in the Princeton Department of Comparative Literature, the Northeastern Nahuatl Conference, and Ordia Prima in Córdoba, Argentina. His self-authored and collaborative publications include Powers of Expression, Expressions of Power (Oxford University Press, now an e-book), Ancient Literary Criticism (OUP), The Epic of America (re-issued as a Bloomsbury paperback in 2020), Italy and the Classical Tradition: Language, Thought and Poetry 1300-1600 (Bloomsbury), Antiquities and Classical Traditions in Latin America (Wiley), and the first comprehensive surveys of Latin writing from colonial Spanish America and Brazil for Brill’s Encyclopedia of the Neo-Latin World (Brill) and Oxford Handbook of Neo-Latin (OUP). A study of Horace's Ars Poetica to introduce Augusto Rostagni's pioneering commentary on the text was published in Bologna in 2020.