Soundscapes of Ancient Fiction: Gender and Ecology of Sound in the Imperial Novel
Lewis-Gibson Visiting Fellowship Research
Dr Francesca Modini
Lewis-Gibson Visiting Fellow, University College, Dublin
Dr Francesca Modini is Lecturer/Assistant Professor in Roman History and Culture at University College Dublin. Her research explores Greek literature and culture under the Roman Empire, with particular interests in lyric poetry, music, sound and classical reception. Her first monograph, Aelius Aristides and the Poetics of Lyric in Imperial Greek Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2025), offers the first sustained study of lyric traditions in imperial Greek literature, examining their role in education, identity, politics and performance. A former Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, she also works on music and sonic culture across imperial and late antique literature and on their reception in later European traditions.
About the project
Dr Modini’s project, Soundscapes of Ancient Fiction: Gender, Diversity, Ecology and Sound in Imperial Novels, develops an acoustic approach to ancient prose fiction. Whereas scholarship on the ancient novel has often privileged vision, space and narrative perspective, the project asks what voices, music, noise and silence reveal about the social and imaginative worlds constructed by Greek and Latin novelists of the Roman imperial period.
The research develops along three interconnected lines. First, it examines sonic agency: how characters speak, sing, make music or are silenced, and how sound articulates relationships between genders and between different social and ethnic groups. Secondly, it considers sound across the boundary between human and non-human life. Metamorphosis may transform a character’s capacity to speak, while animals, objects and disembodied voices can acquire forms of sonic agency of their own. These interactions reveal the novels’ “sonic ecologies”, in which human and more-than-human actors participate in creating fictional worlds.
A third strand follows the afterlife of ancient novelistic sound in European performance culture. Works drawing on ancient fiction, including The Magic Flute, Aida and Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, offer a way of tracing how ancient narratives and their soundscapes were transformed through opera and ballet, where voice, identity and difference are themselves fundamental.
During her Lewis-Gibson Visiting Fellowship, Dr Modini will focus particularly on Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon, examining natural and object sounds and the sonic agency attributed to non-human actors. This work will provide a methodological foundation for the wider book project. By bringing literary analysis into dialogue with gender and diversity studies, sound studies, ecology and reception, the project seeks to show how attention to the acoustic dimension of ancient fiction can transform our understanding of both the novel as a genre and the cultural worlds in which it developed.