Dr. Leon Schmieder
My research focuses on the aesthetics and poetics of the Imperial and Late Antique periods, with particular attention to the materiality and mediality of literary phenomena. I am especially interested in how ancient texts shape and reflect sensory perception, thereby generating specific forms of knowledge and experience. My work explores textual strategies of representing sensory experience, ancient literary and cultural discourses on perception, and the significance of sensory-based aesthetic paradigms for textual criticism and interpretation. In addition, I study the processual and discursive dimensions of represented acts of war in Roman literature, as well as the reception of ancient repositories of knowledge — such as commentaries, compendia, and literary miscellanies — in Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance.
