Maria Elena De Luna holds a PhD in Greek History from the University of Genoa, is a full professor of Greek and Latin language and literature at the Lycée, a specialist in the discipline (Greek History) and for several years was a research associate at the Chair of Greek History at the University of Siena. Since September 2013, she has been an associate lecturer at the Chair of Epigraphy and History of Greek Cities at the Collège de France. Her research is distributed along several lines:her first doctoral thesis, defended in 2002, was published in 2003, under the title La communication linguistique entre les Grecs et les non-Grecs. D'Homère à Xénophon [La comunicazione linguistica fra alloglotti. Da Omero a Senofonte]. Her research focuses on the representation of dialogue between Greeks andnon-Hellenikon peoples in historical and literary works of the Archaic and Classical periods, without neglecting the study of the "vocabulary of acculturation" by authors after the fourth century. In the course of her research, Maria Elena De Luna attempts to highlight various points concerning the relationship between, on the one hand, the construction and reinforcement of the identity profile of a people - notably the Greeks - and, on the other, the varying degrees of interest shown in foreign languages; in addition, through lexical and philological analysis, she proposes interpretative hypotheses on the criteria of linguistic manipulation used by Greek poets, writers and historians to "give shape", evocatively or realistically, to barbarian idioms.
For some years now, Maria Elena De Luna has been taking part in a project sponsored by the Istituto Italiano di Storia Antica in Rome, aimed at publishing a new edition of Aristotle's Politics in the L'Erma di Bretschneider collection. Some of the results of her study of the section entrusted to her have been set out in preliminary contributions, published in conference proceedings and periodicals. At the same time, she is working on a second thesis, dealing with the event and cultural history of Arcadia, in order to produce a new edition of the fragments of works on the region, the product of the interest of local historians who are probably very erudite. This research is part of a project initiated and directed by the Chair of Greek History at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, which is publishing the volumes on fragmentary Greek historiography resulting from this project with Tored (Tivoli-Rome).
