Martina Russo

Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow

mr4241@columbia.edu

Research Interests

• Imperial Latin prose

• Senecan philosophical prose

• Ancient political theory

• Ancient biography

• Roman historiography

Martina Russo is a Postdoctoral Marie Curie Fellow at the Department of Scienze dell'Antichità  (Sapienza University of Rome) and the Department of Classics (Columbia University). 

She completed a BA in Classics (2012), plus a two-year MA in Classical Philology (2015) at Sapienza. Throughout her MA, she was a Visiting Student at St. Anne’s College (University of Oxford). Martina Russo received her Ph.D. in Classics and Ancient History from the University of Warwick in July 2020. She was a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University (September 2018) and Columbia University (April 2022). 

Russo's first book, titled "Flattery in Seneca the Younger: Theory and Practice", was published by Oxford University Press in 2024. She has also published several articles on Seneca, Valerius Maximus, Lucan, and Suetonius.

At Columbia, she is working on her new book project, which analyzes speeches attributed to the Julio-Claudians and investigates the development of a new imperial language starting from Augustus.