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J. Mira Seo

J. Mira
Seo
Fellowship: 
Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow
Term in Residence: 
Spring 2009
Title / Appointment: 
Assistant Professor of Classical Studies and of Comparative Literature
Location: 
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Contact Information

Address: 
104 Mount Auburn St., 3R
Telephone: 
617-495-2121
E-Mail: 
jmseo@umich.edu

Biography Information

J. Mira Seo is an assistant professor of Classical Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan specializing in Latin epic and post-Ovidian Latin poetry.  After graduating with high honors from Swarthmore College in 1995, she completed a second BA in Greats at the University of Oxford in 1998.  She received her Ph.D. from the Princeton University Department of Classics in 2004 with a dissertation on characterization and allusion in Greek and Latin poetry.  In her recent work on authors such as Ovid, Seneca, Statius, and Martial, she focuses on how these authors construct literary tradition and intellectual community within their poetry.  Her book in progress, Allusive Characterization in Latin Literature synthesizes her interests in ancient literary history and conceptions of the self in Roman intellectual culture.  She hopes to complete her translation and commentary on the works of Juan Latino at the Du Bois Institute, and is also preparing research for a monograph on Juan Latino’s library and the classics in ecclesiastical education in 16th century Granada. 

Project Description

The Complete Works of Juan Latino, the First Black Poet, Translated and Edited with Literary and Historical Notes

The life and literary works of Juan Latino (1518?-1597?), a freed slave of North African descent who lived and taught in newly Christianized Granada, have long been obscure to most scholars and students of Spanish Golden Age Humanism.  Although Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s publication in 1998 on sources for Latino’s life brought renewed attention to this 16th century black poet and educator, the absence of a complete text and translation of Latino’s poetry into English has hampered further study of this important figure.  In collaboration with Professor Gates, with assistance from Professor John Quinn (Hope College) and Professor Rudi Lindner (University of Michigan), I hope to complete the editing, translation and commentary (literary and historical) of Latino’s extant two volumes of Latin poetry.  We hope this publication will restore Juan Latino to his rightful position as the beginning of African diaspora literature and a significant figure in the history of European humanism.