Dr Giulia Maltagliati

MA (Pisa), PhD (RHUL, London), AFHEA

I specialise in the field of Greek prose, with a focus on Attic oratory, rhetorical theory, and ancient medical texts. My work interrogates the role of rhetoric at the junction between knowledge and ignorance. It sees rhetoric not as a mere accessory or skill, but as a fundamental medium for the articulation of knowledge and its limits.

I have published on Attic oratory and edited papyri containing fragments from Isocrates and Demosthenes for the Oxyrhynchus Papyri series. My PhD work was awarded the George Grote Prize in Ancient History from the Institute of Classical Studies (London). My current book project, The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Attic Oratory: Time, Knowledge, and Persuasion, explores the use of historical examples in the texts from Attic oratory. It locates the rhetorical workings of historical examples both in the cognitive appeal of the past as a device for self-definition and in the inevitable selectiveness, situationality, and excess of meaning that exemplarity affords. Other than working on my monograph, I am currently co-editing a volume (with Dr Lea Niccolai) on theories and practices of ignorance in antiquity. The first study of its kind, Not Knowing in Antiquity: Discourses of Ignorance in the Greco-Roman World, explores ways in which Greek and Roman texts voiced forms of individual or collective ignorance, addressed incognita such as the human body, death, and divinity, and confronted, or capitalised on, the gap between speaking and understanding. 

As College Professor in Classics, I supervise students on Greek and Latin language and Literature at various levels. I also deliver lectures on Greek literature (Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen) and history (Constructing Sex and Gender) for the Cambridge Faculty of Classics and regularly participate as invited Lecturer in the Royal Holloway MRes programme in Ancient Rhetoric.