Lisa Mignone
Assistant Professor of Classics
While many of her childhood friends were heading off to summer camp, Lisa Mignone and her family were on their way to Southern Italy. “We called it ‘Camp Pompei’,” she jokes. Her father emigrated from Italy, and the frequent family trips to the homeland instilled in her a sort of ancestral affection for Italy, its culture, language and history, particularly the ancient kind.
Even so, through her early high school years, Mignone firmly believed she would become a physician, like her father. Then she discovered Latin. “Cicero defeated Catiline – and sophomore chemistry,” she explains. “We were reading one of the greatest orators of all time. His language, rhetoric, even his sentence structure just captured me.”
Mignone received her A.B. in classics magna cum laude from Harvard with a thesis titled “Rustic Reflections: The Language of Prayer from Cato to Vergil.” She followed with an M.A. in classics from the University of Virginia and an M. Phil. and Ph.D. in the interdisciplinary program in classical studies from Columbia.
Her current research focuses on the Aventine Hill, one of Rome’s canonical seven hills. The study of material culture, urban theory, maps and religious history aid her efforts to correct a misperception that’s perpetuated through modern history. “Contrary to popular and even scholarly opinion,” she says, “the Aventine hill was not the locus of Rome’s rough and revolutionary working class. Pre-modern Rome simply did not have that sort of residential segregation, and various historical events demonstrate the full integration of the Aventine into Rome’s urban core from the very establishment of the city.”
She arrives in Providence after three years in Italy on three separate fellowships. In addition to furthering her work, she says she made valuable contacts with people on the ground who have helped her gain entry to archaeological sites otherwise shut off to the public — and even to most scholars. “I befriended a priest at Santa Sabina and the Aventine’s ispettrice (inspector) for Rome’s archaeological authority. They helped provide me access to resources and sites that continue to direct the course of my research. You simply can’t get that kind of access by burying yourself in a library in America.”
As for her new life as an assistant professor of classics at Brown, she’s most excited by her course offerings, like “Age of Augustus,” and “Catiline.” “After teaching courses in required language sequences, I’m especially excited about coming to a place where I will be teaching very smart students who have chosen to enroll in my classes.”
Department chair John Bodel looks forward to her contribution. “Lisa Mignone brings to the Classics Department a rare breadth of expertise in the history, literature, and material culture of classical Rome, particularly of the Republican period.”
Mignone expresses surprise that anyone could be anything less than enamored of her field, since her interests are broad and deep. “Just read Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, and you’ll see.” When asked to explain her devotion to the classics, she offers, “An art history professor in college once told me that if I spent the rest of my life trying to figure that out, then I will have lived a life well spent.”