Erika Valdivieso

Erika Valdivieso is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics. She specializes in Latin poetry, book history, and the legacies of classical humanism in Spanish and Portuguese America. Her current book project examines four Latin epics from colonial Mexico and Brazil as a case study for the relation between reading and writing Virgilian epic, on the one hand, and the development of soft power, on the other. 

Valdivieso has published in the Bulletin of Latin American Research and in the American Journal of Philology, among other venues. She holds a PhD in Classics from Brown University, where she was a Presidential Fellow and recipient of the Joukowsky Outstanding Dissertation Prize in the Humanities. Before coming to Yale, Valdivieso was a Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Princeton University and a Stuart Fellow at the John Carter Brown Library. She has conducted archival research in Spain, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, and Chile and has been a visiting researcher at the University of Salamanca (Spain), the University of Cambridge, UNAM and the University of São Paulo. She is currently a junior fellow in the Rare Book School’s Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography and a steering committee member of Hesperides, a scholarly organization which promotes the study of classical reception in the Luso-Hispanic world.