Erika Valdivieso

Erika Valdivieso specializes in Latin poetry, book history, and the legacies of classical humanism in colonial Spanish and Portuguese America. Her first book, Empire’s Companion: Virgilian Epics from Iberoamerica (Chicago, 2026) draws attention to the relation between education, literature, and imperial imagination in four Latin epics from colonial Latin America. A series of close readings shows how New World epics draw on a rich network of scholarly and pedagogical texts to repackage notions of empire from Virgil’s Aeneid. She is interested in the history of the book in the Americas and has published on the dissemination and transmission of classical texts in the early modern world. Her next project utilizes poetry from the British, Spanish, and Portuguese Atlantic to trace the untold story of how the Georgics lent itself to aesthetic meditations on and moral challenges to chattel slavery in the Americas.  She is a cofounder of Hesperides, a scholarly organization which promotes the study of classical reception in the Luso-Hispanic world.