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Profile

Research Interests

• Hellenistic and Roman history
• Greek and Latin epigraphy
• Greek sanctuaries and religious interaction
• ancient Greek and Roman religion
• Roman imperialism
• cultural brokerage
• cultural memory
• ancient rhetoric
• Greek���Latin bilingualism, language contact, and code-switching

Education

• PhD, Princeton University
• MSt, University of Oxford
• MA, University of Rome
• BA, University of Rome

Biography

Chiara Battisti is a cultural historian of the Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean. Her research examines cultural brokerage in the Graeco-Roman world, with particular attention to how political authority, local agency, language, and religious practices were negotiated in contexts of political and cultural change. 

She received her PhD in Classics (Ancient History) from Princeton University in 2026. Her doctoral dissertation, Brokers of Culture: Roman Republican Magistrates in Greek Sanctuaries, examined Roman magistrates��� engagement with Greek sanctuaries from the late third to the early second century BCE. It explored how Roman officials adapted language, rhetoric, and religious practices to Greek contexts, and how local traditions shaped encounters with Roman authority in Greek sacred spaces. Her research brings inscriptions into dialogue with literary texts and material evidence to investigate the religious, linguistic, and commemorative dimensions of cultural brokerage.

Her publications include ���The Description of Ionia in Strabo and Pausanias��� (Euphrosyne 50, 2022) and ���Performing Local Knowledge in Hellenistic Alexandria,��� forthcoming in Classical Journal. Both articles examine the formation of local knowledge and the writing of local histories under imperial structures, with particular attention to how intellectuals reorganized inherited traditions and constructed narratives of the Greek past.

At the Centre, she is extending these interests across antiquity and the modern period. Her current research includes work on the ancient historian Polybius and on Alexandria in C. P. Cavafy���s poetry, examining how the past becomes a resource for reflecting on Hellenism, the persistence of memory, and diasporic identity. She is also preparing articles from her doctoral research on Roman interaction with Greek sanctuaries through poetry and commemorative practices.