Ann Vasaly

Curriculum Vitae

My great interest in Cicero and his rhetorical exploitation of the topographical ambiance of his speeches began in 1981 while serving as the graduate assistant at the Centro in Rome. This topic became the subject of my dissertation and of a later book, Representations, published with University of California Press. In more recent years my research has turned to Roman historiography, and especially to Livy. I have just completed a book on the first pentad in which I hope to overturn the conception of Livy as an apolitical moralist by arguing that the first pentad should be read not as history per se, but as a form of theoretical discourse, the goal of which was to convey to the reader, by means of particular events abstract lessons about the interaction of power and personality, including the “personality” of the Roman people en masse.

Research Interests

Latin prose; Cicero; Roman rhetoric; Latin historiography, especially Caesar, Sallust, and Livy

Select Projects and Publications

Epistolary Realities and Fictions: Essays on Roman Letters in Honor of Eleanor Winsor Leach, co-editors: A. Vasaly & T. Ramsby (Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies Supplement 61.2, London: 2018).

“Livy’s Preface and Petrarch, Fam. I.1,” in Atti del convegno internazionale: “Livius Noster” (6-10 novembre 2017, Padova) Giornale Italiano di Filologia. Projected publication: 2019.

“The Ancient Epistolary Collection Redux: ‘Socrates’ and Cicero in Petrarch’s Fam. 1.1,”  Epistolary Realities and Fictions, co-ed.: A. Vasaly & T. Ramsby (BICS Supplement 61.2: 2018) 106-16.

Livy's Political Philosophy: Power and Personality in the First PentadLivy’s Political Philosophy: Power and Personality in the First Pentad (March 2015, Cambridge University Press).

“The Composition of the Ab Urbe Condita: The Case of the First Pentad,” in Wiley-Blackwell: A Companion to Livy, ed. B. Mineo (2014), 217-229.

Representations; Images of the World in Ciceronian OratoryRepresentations; Images of the World in Ciceronian Oratory. (Berkeley 1993; Paperback; 1996).