Associate Professor of Classics Jesse Weiner is on sabbatical this academic year and recently spent time in France, Switzerland, and Rome.
During his stay in France, he visited Switzerland where he presented an invited talk on “Frankenstein and Classical Traditions in Science Fiction” at the Institut International de Lancy, a private school on the outskirts of Geneva. Weiner said the talk stemmed from his longtime work on classics and speculative fiction, including his edited volume, Frankenstein and Its Classics: The Modern Prometheus from Antiquity to Science Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2018).
While in Switzerland he also had a two-week residency at Fondation Hardt, a research center for classical scholarship located in the same neighborhood as the Villa Diodati, where Mary Shelley conceived Frankenstein. Weiner said he worked on several projects while there, including processing final edits for a co-authored book chapter on classics and the politics of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and their coterie of British Romantics. The chapter will be included in a forthcoming volume on classics and social justice.
Weiner spent the last week of November in Rome where he had a course development fellowship from the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies, commonly known as The Centro. He noted that this prestigious study abroad program is often attended by Hamilton students. There he worked on a course, focused on monuments and collective memory in Rome, that he is developing and hopes to teach at Hamilton.
The course stems from his scholarship on the topic in literature, he said, and this visit allowed him to “[dive] deep into the material culture and the sites themselves, which temporally span classical antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Mussolini regime and its aftermath.”
Posted January 5, 2026
