Milena Anfosso

Milena Anfosso (PhD, Sorbonne University) has held research appointments at Harvard University and UCLA. Multilingual herself, she has published and lectured on multilingualism in Antiquity, focusing on linguistic interactions among different populations in Anatolia between the 2nd and 1st millennium BCE, with a particular interest in ancient curses and black magic. Additionally, Milena has worked on Calabrian dialectology and folklore. Based in Los Angeles, she has served as a linguistic consultant in the entertainment industry and is currently co-authoring a YA fantasy novel.

At Bogliasco, Milena will work on her monograph exploring Timotheus of Miletus’s language in the Persians (late 5th-century BCE), a complex piece of Greek literature that narrates the Battle of Salamis (480 BCE) from the Persians’ perspective. Using her extensive knowledge of Ancient Greek, Phrygian, Lydian, and Old Persian, Milena explains Timotheus’s unusual linguistic choices in terms of sociolinguistic mimesis. She also discusses the strategies that he used to convey the 'otherness' of his characters in comparison with other ancient authors and in the frame of so-called 'New Music.'