Professor Gianfranco Agosti

Professor Agosti's research interests lie in Late Antiquity and Byzantine studies. During his time in the UK, he will work on a monograph devoted to a comprehensive study of the social and cultural role of inscriptional Greek poetry in Late Antiquity, from the end of the third to the beginning of the seventh century CE.

The central issues of this work are a re-evaluation of the relation between inscriptional poems and elite literature; an exploration of the social role of poems on stone as vehicles for the display and diffusion of both classical and Christian learning; and a re-consideration of verse inscriptions’ place in the urban space of late antique eastern Mediterranean cities.