Dr. Erika Valdivieso

Biography

Erika Valdivieso specializes in Latin poetry, book history, and the legacies of classical humanism in the Americas. Her upcoming book, Empire’s Companion: Virgilian Epics in Iberoamerica (University of Chicago Press, 2026), draws attention to the relationship between education, literature, and the imperial imagination as reflected in four Latin epics from colonial Latin America. Through a series of close readings, she demonstrates how New World epics are interconnected with scholarly texts that repackage notions of empire found in Virgil’s Aeneid. Her research interests also include the history of books in the Americas, particularly focusing on the dissemination and transmission of classical texts in the early modern world. Valdivieso's ongoing project utilizes poetry from the British, Spanish, and Portuguese Atlantic to trace the untold story of how the Georgics lent itself to aesthetic meditations on the moral challenges posed by transatlantic slavery. She is a co-founder of Hesperides, a scholarly organization that promotes the study of classical reception in the Luso-Hispanic world.

Research Interests

Experience