Eleonora Colli

After completing a BA in Comparative Literature at King's College London (2019), and an MSt in Greek and/or Latin Languages and Literature at the University of Oxford (2020, funded by the Faculty of Classics), I am now continuing my studies at Oxford through a DPhil in Classics, co-supervised by Professor Constanze Güthenke at Oxford and Dr Sebastian Matzner at King's College London and with support from the Clarendon Fund as well as the Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC DTP. My project aims to explore the role played by the figure of the simile in disturbing the gender binary, both across classical literature and its modern reception in 19th and 20th century queer writing. By taking the ‘like’ of the simile as expressing an awareness of the limits of language in defining identity, my thesis will analyze the simile as a classical rhetorical structure which can provide, in modern literature, new ways of describing and portraying gender as a more fluid and evolving concept. Other interests include Modern Greek poetry and theatre, comparative literature, and post-colonial receptions of the classics. In the AY 2020/21, I am co-convening the Corpus Christi Seminar Series at Oxford, titled ‘Queer and the Classical: Futures and Potentialities’, as well as leading the Queer@King's Reading Group. At the end of the AY 2019/20, I have also co-organized a series of workshops on the connections between queerness and classics, a topic which remains at the forefront of my research.