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, 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: “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), and “Finding Single Parent Families in the Epigraphic Record of Imperial Rome” (Familias monoparentales en la Antigüedad, 2023). She presented her new book project – tentatively titled Desperately seeking Caecilia: epigraphy, slavery, and critical fabulation – at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Classical Studies.

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.