Dr Cynthia Liu

Cynthia Liu is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at Warwick, funded by an AHRC Catalyst Award. Her research investigates how Greco-Roman poetry relates to other discourses, especially philosophy and religion, and how these dynamics play out in their reception. At Warwick, she is studying comparisons and connections between Greco-Roman and Chinese Classics, with a focus on early modern Latin translations of Classical Chinese poetry and Sino-Hellenic/Roman comparative poetics. She is the founder and director of The Janus Project, an international research network facilitating scholarly conversations about interactions between Greco-Roman and Sinographic Classical traditions. She also has an interest in Classical Reception in Renaissance Italy, especially the works of E.S. Piccolomini (Pius II).

Contact email: Cynthia.Liu@warwick.ac.uk

Select Publications:

Greco-Roman Literature and the Mysteries: Eleusinian and Bacchic cults and the Orphic tradition from Parmenides to Ovid (under contract, Bloomsbury Academic).

Enea Silvio Piccolomini’s Chrysis: Introduction, Text, Translation, and Commentary. Co-authored with R. A. Smith. November 2025. (Bloomsbury Academic, Bloomsbury Neo-Latin Series: Early Modern Texts and Anthologies).

‘Inscribing China: Virgilian Simile and Epic Ethnography in a Chinese ‘Epyllion’’. International Journal of the Classical Tradition (forthcoming).

‘Parallel Flights: a preliminary comparison of Lucretius and Liu Xie’. Journal of Sinographic Philologies and Legacies 1.4 (2025) 19–45.

‘Fer, Fusa, Φυσάω: Dithyrambic and Acrostic Strategies in Tristia 5.3’. Classical Quarterly 74.2 (2024) 618–32.

“Classical” Translations (1500–1800): Canons, Vernaculars, and Beyond. Special Issue, co-edited with Jamie Wheeler. Forthcoming, International Journal of the Classical Tradition.