Francesca Schironi

Francesca Schironi took her first degree in Classics at the University of Pavia in 1997 and received her PhD in 2002 from the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa. From October 2001 to June 2004 she was Junior Research Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford. In 2003-2004 she also served as lecturer at both Exeter College, Oxford, and Reading University, and worked within the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project as a research assistant to Dirk Obbink.

Francesca's research interests cover three main areas: Hellenistic scholarship and ancient literary criticism, papyrology and the reception of Greek drama.

In the field of Hellenistic scholarship and literary criticism, she has worked extensively on Aristarchus of Samothrace, with several articles and a book collecting his fragments in the Byzantine Etymologica (I frammenti di Aristarco di Samotracia negli etimologici bizantini. Introduzione, edizione critica e commento, Göttingen 2004). She is currently working on a monograph on Aristarchus' work on the Iliad, showing: the Aristotelian heritage in Aristarchus' work; the links between Alexandrian philology and Hellenistic science; and Aristarchus' influence in later and modern Homeric criticism.

Francesca has edited a few papyri of Oxyrhynchus. She has just finished a monograph on book-conventions in rolls and codices containing hexametric poetry (TO MEGA BIBLION; Book-ends, End-titles, Coronides in Papyri with Hexametric Poetry) and a study on a papyrus lexicon with Akkadian, Persian and other Near-Eastern and dialectal glosses, that sheds new light on the cultural interaction between Greeks and the Near East in the Hellenistic age (From Alexandria to Babylon). Francesca founded and directs the Harvard Papyri Digitization Project, whose aim is to digitize the papyrological collection at Harvard. The project will eventually provide a full searchable catalog with digital images, data and bibliographical entries of the Harvard papyrological collection.

Francesca's studies in reception and performance have been focused on the reception of Aristophanes in Italy and on the parabasis of the Birds from a performance point of view. She is now working on the reception of the myth of Eteocles and Polynices in Italian drama and opera from the 16th to the beginning of the 19th century. She is planning to work on a wider project on the reception of Greek drama in Italy from the Renaissance to the 21st century focusing on how stories as those of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Oedipus, Medea and Euripides' Bacchae were received and reinterpreted in Italy in the classicistic Renaissance theatre, in the light operatic entertainment, in the rationalistic Enlightenment, in the Italian Independence process during the 19th century and in the 20th and 21st century cinema and stage.


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