J. Mira Seo
In residence Fall 2007
Assistant Professor of Classical Studies and of Comparative Literature
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan
Address: 104 Mt. Auburn Street, Floor 3R
Telephone: 617.496.6573
Email: jmseo@fas.harvard.edu
Biography
Mira Seo is an assistant professor of Classical Studies and of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan specializing in Latin epic and post-Ovidian Latin poetry. After graduating with high honors from Swarthmore College in 1995, she completed a second BA in Greats at the University of Oxford in 1998. She received her Ph.D. from the Princeton University Department of Classics in 2004 with a dissertation on characterization and allusion in Greek and Latin poetry. In her recent work on authors such as Ovid, Seneca, Statius, and Martial, she focuses on how these authors construct literary tradition and intellectual community within their poetry. Her book in progress, Allusive Characterization in Latin Literature synthesizes her interests in ancient literary history and conceptions of the self in Roman intellectual culture. She hopes to complete her translation and commentary on the works of Juan Latino at the Du Bois Institute, and is also preparing research for a monograph on Juan Latino’s library and the classics in ecclesiastical education in 16th century Granada.
Project
“The Complete Works of Juan Latino, the First Black Poet, Translated and Edited with Literary and Historical Notes”
The life and literary works of Juan Latino (1518?-1597?), a freed slave of North African descent who lived and taught in newly Christianized Granada, have long been obscure to most scholars and students of Spanish Golden Age Humanism. Although Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s publication in 1998 on sources for Latino’s life brought renewed attention to this 16th century black poet and educator, the absence of a complete text and translation of Latino’s poetry into English has hampered further study of this important figure. In collaboration with Professor Gates, with assistance from Professor John Quinn (Hope College) and Professor Rudi Lindner (University of Michigan), I hope to complete the editing, translation and commentary (literary and historical) of Latino’s extant two volumes of Latin poetry. We hope this publication will restore Juan Latino to his rightful position as the beginning of African diaspora literature and a significant figure in the history of European humanism.