Tommaso Gazzarri, assistant professor of classics, has been awarded a prestigious fellowship from the Loeb Classical Library Foundation at Harvard University. His $35,000 award is the highest level of funding offered by the Foundation, and is reserved for the most interesting and promising projects.
Professor Gazzarri will use this prestigious fellowship to support his sabbatical leave in the 2017-2018 academic year. During the fellowship period, he will complete a monograph titled The Stylus and the Scalpel: A Theory and Practice of Metaphors in Seneca’s Prose. This work, with a focus on Seneca’s Epistulae Morales, provides a functional description of the dialectical relation that Seneca draws between metaphorical language and philosophy: namely, it shows how Stoic philosophy finds an innovative means of expression in Seneca’s highly elaborate rhetorical discourse, and how this Senecan mode relates to the social and cultural demands of Neronian culture.