Dr Sara De Martin awarded Leverhulme Study Abroad Studentship

Sara De Martin, formerly ICS Early Career Research Associate (currently Non-stipendiary Research Fellow of the Institute), has taken up a Leverhulme Study Abroad Studentship at the University of Lille in October 2024. This will allow her to work on a two-year post-doctoral project entitled "Wisdom in the Empire: Gender, Authority, Performance" (WisE-GAP).

WisE-GAP will initiate the study of the "gender gap" in the discourse of moral authority in ancient Greek and Roman literature from imperial times (1st-3rd c. CE). It will focus on maxims and chreiai, mobilising them as fundamental rhetorical devices for the construction of gendered and socially situated identities. Sara will highlight how maxims were thought to be differently useful to men, women, and children, how they were deployed by male authors to create gendered personae and project moral authority. She will also deconstruct "female" moral voices, studying their form, contents, and uses in context. The research will consist in an all-round investigation of maxims and chreiai in imperial culture: it aims at understanding inside views on their moral and rhetorical functions, their rhetorical potential for the projection of (situated) authority, and how they related to and promoted gender biases.