Camilla Piana

Before coming to Stanford, I studied Classics at Cambridge University, where I also took courses in Classical Japanese Literature and Language at the Faculty of East Asian Studies.

My research focuses on the intersection of poetry and philosophy. As an undergraduate, I explored lyric iterability and mediocritas in Horace in relation to Plato’s definition of beauty, and for my thesis I compared poetic aesthetics in early modern Japanese waka and Greek lyric. In that work, I examined Dōgen’s and Plato’s views on poetry and impermanence, arguing that lyric’s peculiarities can partially elude Plato’s critique of poetry and even resonate with his philosophical ideas.

My MPhil thesis, Homeric Entomology, brought many of my interests together in a sustained project. I studied Homer’s insect imagery and similes in dialogue with Aristotle’s zoological observations, highlighting the role of insects in articulating human ephemerality. This research has grown into a broader project on entomology in post-Homeric lyric and tragedy, considered through the anthropology of nature and post humanist theory. I recently presented an introduction to this work—Entomology in Greek Poetry—at the BSHP annual conference, Animals and the Environment in the History of Philosophy, held in Cambridge.