Giovanna Ceserani in Greece and Turkey

Giovanna Ceserani, a classicist and historian, has been teaching Stanford students since 2003. A native of Italy, Professor Ceserani's research focuses on the cultures of the ancient world, with a special interest in how new technologies can contribute to our knowledge of the past. She directs Stanford’s Grand Tour Project and recently served six years as faculty director of Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA). She has also served twice as the faculty in residence at Stanford's Florence Center, most recently in 2024. Professor Ceserani has published two books: Italy’s Lost Greece (Oxford, 2012), on the history of archaeology and the reconstruction of classical Greece in the modern world, and A World Made by Travel: the Digital Grand Tour (Stanford, 2024), a digital and open-access book on the history of modern classical tourism, which specifically revolutionizes our understanding of the eighteenth-century “Grand Tour” of Italy.

Our own classical travels will take us to sites with extraordinary millennial histories, resulting from the meeting of fascinating ancient cultures. Professor Ceserani will guide our understanding of these sites’ multilayered pasts. She will also foreground the experiences of earlier generations of travelers. Who were the first modern travelers to these ancient lands, and what were they looking for? How did they encounter these places before photography had been invented, and prior to so many other transformative technologies that today we take for granted? What would it be like to visit these ancient lands without a camera - and without having seen pictures of them beforehand? Throughout our journey, we will also reflect on the epistemology of travel: what does it mean to learn about a place by actually being there?

At Stanford

• Clayman Faculty Fellow, 2024–2025

• Omar and Althea Dwyer Hoskins Faculty Scholar, 2020–2022

• Internal Faculty Fellow Stanford Humanities Center, 2017–2018 and 2007–2008

• William H. and Frances Green Faculty Fellow, 2007–2008

Beyond Stanford

• John Rexine Memorial Lecture at Colgate University, 2023

• New Directions Fellow of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 2012–2015

• Scholar Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 2006

• Cotsen Fellow in the Princeton Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, 2000–2003