Mateu Portells Watson

Research topic during fellowship: Voluntary and Forced Migrants in the Transfer of Greek Language and Literature Towards Rome (240 BCE-212 CE)

Mateu Portells Watson is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History and Archaeology at the University of Crete and a researcher at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies. He graduated in Classical Philology from the University of Barcelona (2020) and received an MPhil in Classics from Trinity College Dublin (2022) for his work on the textual transmission of the Iliad in southeastern Italy during the thirteenth century. His current research focuses on the participation of enslaved persons in literary production. He is a member of the ERC project “SLaVEgents: Enslaved persons in the making of societies and cultures in Western Eurasia and North Africa, 1000 BCE-300 CE.” He collaborates in the collection of biographical evidence for enslaved individuals from Greek and Latin literary sources. During his fellowship at the CHS, he will be examining the role of enslaved and free migrants in the transmission of Greek culture towards the West. In his work, he will investigate how the coexistence of these simultaneous, but radically different, patterns of mobility affected the development of literature in Rome.