Giovanna Ceserani

Giovanna Ceserani works on the classical tradition with an emphasis on the intellectual history of classical scholarship, historiography and archaeology from the eighteenth century onwards. She is interested in the role that Hellenism and Classics played in the shaping of modernity and, in turn, in how the questions we ask of the classical past originate in specific modern cultural, social and political contexts. She has been the Faculty Director of the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA), Stanford's hub for digital humanities, since 2019. 

She is the author of two books. A World Made by Travel: The Digital Grand Tour was published by Stanford University Press in 2024, and Italy’s Lost Greece: Magna Graecia and the Making of Modern Archaeology appeared from Oxford University Press in 2011. She is also working on books about the emergence of modern histories of ancient Greece, and on ancient women in modern historiography. She was a founding member of the Stanford digital project Mapping the Republic of Letters, and is director of the Stanford digital project The Grand Tour Project.