Irene Peirano Garrison
Irene Peirano Garrison studied at Oriel College, Oxford (B.A. Hons. Literae Humaniores 2002) and Harvard University (Ph.D. Classical Philology 2007). Before joining Harvard, she was on the faculty of the Classics department at Yale from 2007 to 2020, and served in Archaia (the Yale Program for the Study of Ancient and Premodern Cultures and Societies) and in the Yale Women Faculty Forum.
Professor Peirano Garrison works on Roman poetry and its relation to rhetoric, literary criticism and scholarship, both ancient and modern. She is especially interested in ancient strategies of literary reception, in notions of authorship and authenticity in antiquity and in the history of ancient rhetoric, classical scholarship and education.
Her first book—The Rhetoric of the Roman Fake: Latin Pseudepigrapha in Context (CUP, 2012)—sets authorial and chronological fictions in the context of the practices of impersonation and role-play in the literary culture and education of the Imperial period, and explores these works as part of the early reception history of canonical authors such as Virgil, Tibullus and Ovid. Her second book—Persuasion, Rhetoric and Roman Poetry (CUP, 2019)—investigates the boundaries between rhetoric and poetry in the Imperial period. Moving away from the traditional focus on cataloguing "rhetorical" elements in poetic texts, the book explores the construction of poetry in texts such as the Controuersiae and Suasoriae of Seneca the Elder and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria and select responses to these narratives in Roman poetry, and investigates the figure of Vergilius orator in Macrobius, Florus, Servius and Tiberius Claudius Donatus.
She is currently working on a monograph entitled The Latin playbook: philology, politics and pedagogy in the Latin classroom (under contract with Cambridge University Press and to be published in the Cultures of Latin series). The book explores the history of Latin pedagogy and its complex entanglements with questions of political, religious, gender and racial identity. Together with Jackie Elliott and Constanze Güthenke, she is working on an edited volume on Latin literature and its origin stories, based on the 2025 Jackson Colloquium. Current research projects focus on ancient pseudepigrapha, ancient rhetoric, especially Cicero and Quintilian, and the reception of Cicero in the Augustan period.
Professor Peirano Garrison is one of the founding members of the Colloquium for Ancient Rhetoric. She teaches widely in the field of Latin literature, especially Latin poetry and ancient rhetoric and literary criticism. She also teaches courses on authorship and practices of reading and exegesis in Greco-Roman antiquity, comparative antiquities, Classics and literary theory, history of classical pedagogy and scholarship and classical reception. She welcomes enquiries from students interested in any of the above. Sign up for office hours.