Professor Jennifer A. Rea’s research explores the intersections between ancient Rome and modern science fiction and fantasy. Her love of the classics began when she was five years old and her parents took her to visit the Colosseum in Rome. And when her father took her to see the real live wolf that used to be on display on the Capitoline hill, she decided to study Latin so she could learn more about Rome’s origins.
Her first book, Legendary Rome, explored three poets’ reinventions of Rome’s legendary foundations (the story of Romulus and Remus) in the context of post-civil war Augustan Rome. Her most recent book, Perpetua’s Journey: Faith, Gender and Power in the Roman Empire, is a graphic history (Oxford University Press, 2018). Perpetua’s Journey challenges critical assumptions about gender roles, legal authority and individual rights and freedoms in Roman Africa during the 3rd C CE. (For more about the graphic history, look here)
She is the recipient of an NEH stipend to attend the seminar on Roman Religion and the Ursula K. Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship.