John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study

Irene Peirano Garrison (PhD Harvard, 2007) is the Pope Professor of the Latin language and literature at Harvard University. She 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, in the history of ancient rhetoric, classical scholarship, and education and in critical Humanities study. Her first book —  The Rhetoric of the Roman Fake: Latin Pseudepigrapha in context (Cambridge University Press, 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 the relationship between the Latin canon and its margins. Her second book —  Persuasion, Rhetoric and Roman Poetry (CUP, 2019) — investigates the boundaries between rhetoric and poetry in Latin literature of the Imperial period. She teaches widely in the field of Latin literature, ancient rhetoric and literary criticism, comparative antiquities, Classics and literary theory, history of classical scholarship and classical reception. 

As a Brown 2026/JNBC Visiting Senior Fellow, she will be working on a monograph entitled The Latin playbook: philology, politics and the Latin classroom (under contract with Cambridge University Press and to be published in the Cultures of Latin series). The book explores the role of the Latin language in the history of Western education with an emphasis on the North American context. Through a selective survey of the archive, which includes textbooks, student notebooks, treatises on pedagogy, and curricular debates, this first-of-its-kind political history of Latin language pedagogy investigates the forms of Latin instruction in their complex entanglement with questions of political, gender, racial and religious identity. She is especially interested in the role of classical languages in the development of the modern research university and in the relationship between philology, nation-building and democracy.