Gaia Gianni joined the OSU Classics Department in 2022, after obtaining her PhD from Brown University in 2020. Her interests include Roman social history, Latin prose, Roman epigraphy, gender studies, the history of slavery, and the Roman family.

She is the author of All in the Family: Childhood and Fictive Kinship in Roman Society (Michigan, 2025). https://press.umich.edu/Books/A/All-in-the-Family2

She has also published on a variety of epigraphic topics, such as “Playing on Emotions: Enslaved Child Workers and Emotional Labor in the Roman Empire” (The Classical Journal 2026), “Mamma and Tata: Considerations on Social Designations and Family Structure in Rome” (Journal of Epigraphic Studies 2021), “Feronia, votive inscriptions and servile worshippers: an epigraphical and literary analysis” (Historia, 2023).

Presently, Professor Gianni is working on her new book project, tentatively titled Searching for Caecilia: epigraphy, slavery, and critical fabulation, under contract with the University of Michigan Press. The book project combines critical fabulation – the theoretical framework and ethical scaffold developed by Saidiya Hartman – with the close reading of epigraphical materials, in order to both investigate and redress the lives of enslaved through narratives that are deeply rooted in archival materials and comparative evidence. The project aims at showcasing that critical fabulation can be valuable for both research and teaching as academics grapple with new and old questions in the field of Classics, including how to study the past in a responsible and fruitful manner.

Professor Gianni also serves as the Director of Epigraphy at the Center for Epigraphical and Palaeographical Studies. In 2024, she was awarded, together with her colleagues Profs. Sessa and Coulson, a grant from the Arts and Humanities division of $20,000 for the promotion of digital epigraphy and the creation of a new online database for the Center’s collections. In 2026, she has organized the conference “Social History and Epigraphic Evidence”, for which she also received a grant from the College of Arts and Sciences.