Didier Natalizi Baldi

Didier Natalizi Baldi is a doctoral student in Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Oxford, where he is an AHRC (jointly founded by the All Souls-AHRC Graduate Scholarship) and Clarendon scholar.

His dissertation, supervised by Prof. Giuseppe Pezzini, focuses on the poetics of early Latin epics: the literary artifices and rhetorical structures that, beyond linguistic peculiarities, mark the verse of Naevius and Ennius. Combining philological and literary critic approaches, his work aims to contribute to a theoretically-informed but textually-driven vision of poetic craft in Republican Rome, and thus also to the understanding of the following literary phenomena of the Late Republic.

Natalizi Baldi’s further scholarly interests range from textual criticism to literary theory, reception studies, and comparative literature (particularly Chinese, Sanskrit, and Graeco-Roman). He has co-authored two articles on the afterlife of Sallust’s works, forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, and has presented on comparative topics at conferences in the United States and Taiwan.

Natalizi Baldi holds BA degrees (double honors and distinction) in Classics and East Asian Studies from Stanford University and an AM in Regional Studies East Asia from Harvard University; he has been the recipient of the Stanford “Sterling Award” and “Golden Medal,” as well as other departmental prizes.