Rate My Professor Alessandro Schiesaro

Alessandro Schiesaro is Professor of Latin Literature at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. He studied in Pisa as a scholar of the Scuola Normale Superiore, earning his Laurea, Diploma and PhD. He also obtained an MA from the University of California, Berkeley, thanks to a Fulbright Fellowship, and studied at Oxford.

His academic career began as Assistant Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He subsequently held chairs of Classics at Princeton University, of Latin Language and Literature at King’s College London, and of Latin Literature at Sapienza University of Rome, where he was the Founding Director of the Sapienza School for Advanced Studies. At the University of Manchester he was Hulme Professor of Classics and served as Head of the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures from 2016 to 2021. While at King’s he served as Head of Department and Deputy Head of School and also as chair of the University of London’s Subject Panel in Classics. He headed the Technical Secretariat for Research in Italy’s Ministry of Education from 2008 to 2015, and from 2015 to 2018 he was a member of the Comitato Nazionale dei Garanti della Ricerca; in 2012 to 2015 he was a member of the EU’s High Level Group on the Modernisation of Higher Education. He is a member of the Scientific committee and the Board of the Fondazione Lorenzo Valla. His main fields of interest include Latin literature, literary theory, psychoanalysis and cultural history; he is especially fascinated by the interaction between poetry and philosophy and by the role of poetry as a form of knowledge. His work focuses mostly on Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid and Seneca, and he has also published on Horace, Statius, Apuleius and Leopardi. He is currently writing a commentary on Aeneid 1 for Cambridge University Press. He edits the Classical journal MAIA – Rivista di Letterature Classiche and is a member of the editorial board of Dictynna, Materiali e Discussioni per l’Analisi dei Testi Classici, Rivista di Filologia e Istruzione Classica, Studi Italiani di Filologia Classica and Trends in Classics. He is a member of Academia Europaea and Accademia Pontaniana. He has been a Visiting Professor at Stanford and has lectured extensively in Europe and the US. Since May 2025 he has served as Director of the Scuola Normale Superiore for the six-year period 2025-2031.