John Rowe Workman Distinguished Professor of Classics and Humanities and Professor of Hispanic Studies, Director of the Center for the Study of the Early Modern World

Overview

Andrew Laird came to Brown from Warwick University where he held a personal chair in Classical Literature. His research interests extend beyond ancient Greece and Rome to the European Renaissance and the colonial Americas.  His 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 2020, and his current projects include a text and translation of Petrarch’s Africa for the Harvard I Tatti Renaissance Library. Activities in the past year have included invited talks at the Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas in UNAM-Mexico, at a colloquium on the early modern reception of Aristotle at UPenn, and at the Shifting Frontiers Late Antiquity conference in Santa Barbara, and conference presentations in Copenhagen, Oxford and Tübingen.

Andrew Laird’s latest publication, Aztec Latin (Oxford University Press 2024), is a historical study of sixteenth-century Mexico, focusing on the education and accomplishments of indigenous scholars in the first decades after the Spanish conquest. This book calls attention to the contribution native Mexican authors made to early modern intellectual history, and shows that consideration of Renaissance humanism is important for a full understanding of what those authors – who wrote in Latin as well as in their language of Nahuatl – really did achieve.

Brown Affiliations

On the Web