Biography

I was born and raised in Bucharest, Romania, where I also graduated from the University of Bucharest in 2004 after reading Latin and Romanian. I also completed a master’s in linguistics, after which I obtained a permanent position as a researcher at the Institute of Linguistics of the Romanian Academy. At the same time I got involved in journalism as a correspondent at the Romanian Parliament and Presidency. However, the turning point in my career was the year that I spent at Cambridge (2009 / 2010) as a visiting student, carrying out research on rhetoric and discourse analysis. Then I decided to return to my former passion about classics and to build up an academic career in this field. My PhD project at Cambridge is about Latin rhetoric: it consists in a commentary on the “Pro Flacco”, one of Cicero’s least known and appreciated speeches. The choice of the topic was motivated by the following factors: a) there is, surprisingly, no extensive and up-to-date academic discussion in classical scholarship on this important speech either in English or in any other language; b) the “Pro Flacco” is a key source for understanding Roman imperialism in general and the complicated relationship between Rome and Asia Minor in 1st c. B.C. in particular; c) this speech exposes all the xenophobic clichés which were present in the cultural space of Rome at the end of the Republic and the way they were exploited in politics and oratory.