Valentina Arena

Valentina Arena ^FSA is a professor of Ancient History. She is the Camden Professor of Ancient History at the University of Oxford, a post established in 1622. She is also a Professorial Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford. Arena was previously Professor of Ancient History at University College London. She is an expert on the history of ancient ideas and political thought, particularly in the Roman Republic. Her work focuses on antiquarianism, Varro, ancient philosophy of language, and Roman constitutionalism.

Education

Arena received her PhD from University College London in 2002. The title of her doctoral thesis was Democratic Ideas and Political Practice in the Late Roman Republic. She was awarded a BA from the University of Florence.

Research and career

Arena received a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) for her project, 'Ordering, Constructing, Empowering: Fragments of the Roman Republican Antiquarians' (2020–25). The project explores antiquarianism in the Roman Republic. She is currently co-editing the first volume of the Cambridge History of Democracy.

Arena previously worked at the British Museum in the Department of Coins and Medals. She was Lecturer, Reader and Professor at UCL before her appointment as the Camden Professor of Ancient History. She is the twenty-sixth person to hold the post, and she is the first woman.

Arena was made a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 2022. She contributed to the BBC's In Our Time on Cicero.

Bibliography

• (ed. by V. Arena and J.R.W. Prag), A Companion to the Political Culture of the Roman Republic (New York-London, 2022)
• (ed. by V. Arena), Liberty: Ancient Ideas and Modern Perspectives (Routledge, 2020)
• (ed. by V. Arena and G. Piras), Reconstructing the Republic: Varro and Imperial Authors, special issue of Res Publica Litterarum 39 (2018)
• (ed. by V. Arena and F. Mac Góráin), Varronian Moments, special issue of the Bulletin of Classical Studies (2017)
• V. Arena, Libertas and the Practice of Politics in the Late Roman Republic (Cambridge, 2012)

External links

• UCL Staff Page: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/history/people/academic-staff/professor-valentina-arena
• BMCR (open-access) review of her monograph: https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2013/2013.08.51/