About our staff

Born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in Treaty One Territory, Canada, I took an Honours BA from the University of Winnipeg in 2014 and MA and PhD degrees from the University of Toronto in 2016 and 2021. After finishing up my thesis (The Latin past and the poetry of Catullus, supervised by Michael Dewar), I spent 8 months as a Postdoc and Instructor at the University of British Columbia before coming here to Edinburgh.

https://edinburgh.academia.edu/JesseHill

Summary of research interests

• Mediterranean

• Language & Literature

• Antiquity

I primarily work on the poetry and cultural history of Italy in the third, second, and first centuries BCE. I'm generally interested in poetics and allusion, themes of ethnicity and cultural identity, and literary fragments and their transmission.

My main task at Edinburgh is to finish my monograph, Catullus and the Three Hearts of Quintus Ennius, an activity which has been generously funded by UKRI. But I have lots of other things on the go: a volume of essays about Ennius’ non-epic poetry, co-edited with C. W. Marshall; several papers on various shadowy Latin poets (Porcius Licinus, Valerius Cato, Tiburtinus, Furius Bibaculus); a collaborative project with Jarrett Welsh on the Renaissance transmission of Paulus’ epitome of Festus; and, in its very early stages, a commentary on Varro’s Menippean Satires.