Maria Giulia Genghini

I received my Bachelor’s degree in Classics from the University of Bologna (2006-9), while also completing a year long Erasmus exchange at UCL (2008-9). After an MA degree in Ancient History at UCL (2009-10), I returned to Bologna for a second MA degree in Classics (2012). I completed my PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, US (2011-2017). During my doctoral studies, I held various research grants that supported my travels to Jesuit archives at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá (Summer 2013), at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador, Quito (Summer 2014), at the Pontificia Università Gregoriana and the Jesuit Roman archive (ARSI), Rome (Summer 2015). I was a visiting PhD researcher in the Classics department at King’s in the Spring 2017. I (re-)joined the Classics department at KCL as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in October 2017.

• Jesuit Rhetoric in Colonial South America
• The Reception of Biblical and Patristic sources, especially Augustine, in Jesuit Neo-Latin texts
• Early Christianity and its reception of classical antiquity

As a graduate in Classics and Comparative Literature, I specialised in Jesuit reception of patristic traditions in colonial Latin America. My doctoral thesis,Prophets of a New Israel – Jesuit Rhetoric in the New World, explored the influence of Augustinian theories of education in Jesuit vernacular sermons.

The extensive archival research performed during my doctoral studies has lead me to the discovery of largely ignored manuscripts, which include examples of a distinctive kind of Latin Jesuit meditation. Following my interests in the history and reception of classical ideas in the New World, my post-doctoral work will focus on the literary and theological interest of these scriptural meditations, and on the significant extent to which they reflect the cultural practices of the indigenous communities to whom the Jesuits were preaching.