Dr Aaron Pelttari (MA, PhD)

Senior Lecturer; Teaching Director for Classics

Biography

Background

I grew up in Illinois and Wisconsin in the USA and earned my PhD in Classics from Cornell University in 2012, before moving to Edinburgh in 2014 to begin a Chancellor's Fellowship. I was promoted to a Lectureship in Latin Literature in 2017 and to a Senior Lectureship in 2020. After more than 10 years at the University of Edinburgh, I feel that the label 'New Scot' is no longer entirely accurate; but immigration is a part of my life story that, in the best of times, enriches my teaching and research.

Responsibilities & affiliations

Co-editor of Edinburgh Studies in Later Latin Literature

Undergraduate teaching

  • Various subhonours Latin courses: Catullus (selections); Cicero, De amicitia; Aulus Gellius (selections); Prudentius, Pyschomachia; Seneca (selections from the Epistulae); Virgil, Aeneid 2. These intermediate courses were Latin 1c, Latin 1d, Latin 2a, Latin 2b, and Intermediate Latin 1 & 2.
  • Lectures on the Aeneid for Classical Literature in Translation 2.
  • Later Latin Poetry (Honours level).
  • Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy (Honours level).
  • Latin Epic (Honours level).
  • Poetry and Culture from Antquity to the Middle Ages (Honours level, in translation).

Postgraduate teaching

  • Classics Methodology Seminar (various lectures)
  • Latin Text Seminar: topics including Claudian's De raptu Proserpinae, the writings of Sidonius Apollinaris; the poetry of Prudentius, and the Aeneid.

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Areas of interest for supervision

 

  

Current PhD students supervised

Primary supervisor

Bersani, Beatrice PhD The colours of God: Polychromatic imagery for the divine in late antique Latin poetry.

Lazzoni, Clara PhD Seeing texts, reading images: approach to late antique concrete poetry based on Optatian

Paterson, Rory PhD Looking back: Love and torment in Late Antique “revivalist” Latin poetry

White, Joseph PhD A commentary on book 6 of the Iohannis of Gorippus

Secondary supervisor

Homewood, Murdo PhD Imagery of Illness and Healing in Augustine’s Sermones ad Populum

 

Past PhD students supervised

Secondary supervisor

Bruce, Joshua PhD Coercive precedents: The place of Donatist appeals in Augustine’s anti-Donatist polemic (2018)

Sagliardi, Giulia PhD Claudian, Bellum Geticum. A Literary & Historical Commentary (2021)

Research summary

I am interested in Latin literature and its contexts. My research has centered on the Latin poetry of Late Antiquity. During the fourth century, authors came to write in ways that invited or even demanded the active involvement of their readers. The disjointed fragments of the text called readers to see that meaning was created at the point of reception. I described this transformation of Classical Latin poetry in The Space That Remains: Reading Latin Poetry in Late Antiquity.

The poets of Late Antiquity created and lived through times of intense change, economic, political, and cultural change. I study their work because I am fascinated by the differences of Classical literature, by the ways in which authors managed to make the past present, and by the power of poetry to create meaning and belief as it is read. I first began to work on the poetry of late antiquity in graduate school, because I wanted to re-read the words that transformed Classical culture. In addition to late antique poetry, I am interested in hermeneutics, translation, paratexts, ancient commentaries, manuscript studies, and reception.

Places: 

  • Europe
  • Mediterranean

Themes: 

  • Ancient Civilisations
  • Culture
  • Language & Literature

Periods: 

  • Antiquity
  • Medieval

Current research interests

I continue to work on the poetry of Late Antiquity. In recent years, this has meant Prudentius, in particular, with a student commentary on the Psychomachia published in 2019 by the University of Oklahoma Press, as well as several articles and related chapters. The De raptu Proserpinae of Claudian is another focus. A different kind of project is The Cambridge History of Later Latin Literature (2025), which I have edited with Gavin Kelly. The two volumes of this book will cover the diversity of Latin literature in its historical contexts from roughly 100 to 700 C.E., in 50 chapters and with 41 scholars involved from around the world. A new area of research interest concerns the reception and memory of Late Antiquity, as a means by which to understand how generations have coped with and moved beyond the transformations (crises and catastrophes) that have upended their worlds. Thus, if the Psychomachia and De raptu Proserpinae offer a view of how their communities understood the transformations of Late Antiquity, we should be able to see in them and in their textual history (by which I mean their reception in the largest sense) some part of the story of how Christianity and paganism and progress (for example) came to occupy a major place in European cultures.

Affiliated research centres

  • Centre for Late Antique, Islamic and Byzantine Studies

Project activity

The list below is a subset of the information held on the University of Edinburgh PURE system, and includes Books, Chapters, Articles and Conference contributions. For a full list, including details of other publication types (e.g. reviews), please see the Edinburgh Research Explorer page for Dr Aaron Pelttari.

Books - Authored

Pelttari, A. (2019) The Psychomachia of Prudentius: Text, Commentary, and Glossary. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma

Pelttari, A. (2014) The Space That Remains: Reading Latin Poetry in Late Antiquity. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University PressDOI: https://doi.org/10.7591/9780801455001

Articles

Pelttari, A. (2019) The authorial drama of Prudentius in the Apotheosis, Amartigenia, and Psychomachia. Lucida Intervalla, 48, pp. 139–162

Pelttari, A. (2019) The reader and the resurrection in Prudentius. The Journal of Roman Studies (JRS), 109, pp. 205–239DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0075435819000893

Pelttari, A. (2016) Sidonius Apollinaris and Horace Ars poetica 14-23. Philologus, 160(2), pp. 322-336DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/phil-2016-5010

Pelttari, A. (2011) Approaches to the writing of Greek in late antique Latin texts. Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 51(3), pp. 461-482

Pelttari, A. (2011) Symmachus' Epistulae 1.31 and Ausonius' poetics of the reader. Classical Philology: A Journal Devoted to Research in Classical Antiquity (CP), 106(2), pp. 161-169DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/659850

Pelttari, A. (2009) Donatist self-identity and “The Church of the Truth”. Augustinianum, 49(2), pp. 359-369DOI: https://doi.org/10.5840/agstm20094923

Chapters

Pelttari, A. (2022) Speaking from the margins: Paratexts in Greek and Latin poetry. In: Verhelst, B. and Scheijnen, T. (eds.) Greek and Latin Poetry of Late Antiquity: Form, Tradition, and Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 69-88DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009031769.006

Pelttari, A. (2020) The literary horizons of the poem In Evangelia. In: Hernández Lobato, J. and Prieto Domínguez, Ó. (eds.) Literature Squared: Self-reflexivity in Late Antique Literature. Turnhout: Brepols, pp. 15–40

Pelttari, A. (2020) The rhetor Sapaudus and conflicting literary models in Sidonius Apollinaris and Claudianus Mamertus. In: Onorato, M. (ed.) Lo specchio del Modello: Orizzonti intertestuali e Fortleben di Sidonio Apollinare. Naples: Paolo Loffredo, pp. 191–210

Pelttari, A. (2017) Lector inueniet: A commonplace of Late Antiquity. In: Vinzent, M. (ed.) Studia Patristica: Papers presented at the Seventeenth International Conference on Patristic Studies held in Oxford 2015. Leuven: Peeters, Leuven, pp. 215-227

Pelttari, A. (2016) A lexicographical approach to the poetry of Optatian. In: Squire, M. and Wienand, J. (eds.) Morphogrammata / The lettered Art of Optatian: Figuring Cultural Transformations in the Age of Constantine. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, pp. 369-390

Pelttari, A. (2016) ‘Unity and Diversity in Jacques Fontaine’s Late Antiquity’. In: Ando, C. and Formisano, M. (eds.) The New Late Antiquity. Heidelberg

Pelttari, A. (2016) Speaking from the Margins: Paratexts in Greek and Latin. In: Walking the Wire. Latin and Greek Late Antique Poetry in Dialogue.

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